Guitar Hero II

There is nothing quite like Guitar Hero. It was created by Harmonix, a group of developers in Boston, as the logical progression of their rhythm games, FreQuency and Amplitude. In those titles, you pressed a Playstation controller’s buttons in time with a licensed song while all sorts of fancy stuff happened onscreen. Pretty cool, if you’re into that stuff.

But the genius of Guitar Hero was that it took the same basic gameplay – you press buttons in time with a licensed song – and slapped onto it a new front-end built around a plastic guitar-shaped controller. This time you held buttons down on the fret and clicked a little “strummer” bar on the body of the guitar, an experience not at all like playing a real guitar, but quite close to what you might have imagined playing a guitar must be like. Have you ever played the air guitar? You know you have. This was like doing just that, but with a prop and audio feedback. Hit the buttons correctly, and the guitar track of the song was enabled. Screw it up, and the rest of the song played along without you.

It was a reverse Copernican shift: you became the center of the game. There is still a game on screen, with points to unlock bonus songs, and high scores, and cute graphics of a band presenting a concert, all tucked behind the button indicators you have to watch intently. But unlike Harmonix’s previous games, the really cool part of Guitar Hero isn’t happening onscreen; the really cool part is you. Admittedly, you probably look dorky, with a chintzy guitar not much bigger than a ukulele clutched against your abdomen, and most likely unshaven, out of shape, and/or not particularly graceful.

But you’re not playing Guitar Hero in front of a mirror. So for those moments that Boston’s “More Than a Feeling”, Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water”, or Blue Oyster Cult’s “Godzilla” are scrolling down the screen, you are a rock god, making the music happen. Lest I’m dating myself, sub in Guitar Hero’s Franz Ferdinand, Queens of the Stone Age, or Sum 41 songs. It’s a generous song list for a wide range of tastes.

If you know all this about Guitar Hero, the odds are that you are already playing Guitar Hero II. But if this is news to you, the point of this review is pretty simple: Guitar Hero II is a must-have, and reason enough to get a Playstation 2. I don’t care if you dislike rhythm games. I don’t care if you’re not particularly fired-up by any of the songs on the song list. I don’t care if you think you’d feel foolish. This is one of those rare titles that transcends the medium. Guitar Hero is not a game, it is an experience.

The most salient fact about the sequel is the new song list. Every review of Guitar Hero II brings its own personal baggage to the song list. Mostly, you will read complaints that there isn’t any Led Zeppelin, that the one Van Halen song sucks (and it’s a Kinks song, to boot), and that the Kurt Cobain imitator is truly awful. These things are all sadly true. But it is also true that this game has a solid song list. There is enough here that you will find something you like, with more than a few additional songs eventually growing on you. Most of the imitators are really good, and Harmonix even managed to get one original artist on board, even if it is just Primus. No offense to Primus fans, but how tough would it have been to get, say, Ozzie, Axl, or Steven Tyler?

The career progression in Guitar Hero II is much better than it was in the first game. The sense of your band’s rise to glory, the encores along the way, the out-of-this-world finale, and the unlockable songs and cosmetic options are all improvements over the original Guitar Hero. The new multiplayer options are also much improved. This is a considerably better game if you are fortunate enough to have a pair of guitars and a willing friend. The ‘willing friend’ is the easiest part of the equation; if there’s a game better suited than Guitar Hero to getting gamers and non-gamers alike interested, I haven’t seen it. In addition to the traditional division of a song into alternating parts for each player, two players can do the entire song alongside each other in a new competitive mode. There is also a new co-op mode for two players, in which one plays the lead guitar track, and the other plays the bass or rhythm guitar track. It may very well be the most fun two people can have without being naked.

Perhaps the biggest improvement in Guitar Hero II is the new practice mode. The difficulty levels in this game are markedly different, and it can be a real challenge to move up through easy, medium, hard, and expert. But it is much more gratifying to play on the harder levels, so there’s plenty of incentive to learn. In the original game, it took a lot of sheer repetition and tedium to get better. You had to play an entire song over and over, making mistake after mistake after mistake, to learn it with no easy way to isolate the hard solos that might sabotage you in the middle of the song. But now you can select a section of a song, and slow it down as much as you want. This is a great way to train your fingers and ears, and ultimately to get the most out of Guitar Hero II.