Reviews// Guitar Hero II (PS2)

Wanna be a rock star? Back in the day, if you had teenage desires to be a metal legend, you would shut yourself in your room, whack on a bit of Zeppelin, Sabbath or Nirvana and air guitar your day away.

But this is the 21st Century, and with the advent of this interesting thing called ‘interactive entertainment’, you can now pretend to be a heroic strummer by way of a plastic guitar and a Playstation 2.

Red Octane’s original Guitar Hero tapped into every right-thinking person’s desire to twiddle their fingers at an alarming rate while kneeling on the floor with Anything but a tennis racquet. Now the sequel has come around, it’s time that SPOnG once again called upon its trusty axe for some plastic plank-spanking.

For those not familiar with the set-up (and just where have you been?) the game is played thus: coloured circles, signifying frets on a guitar (and corresponding to the buttons on the Guitar Hero controller) will run from the top of the screen towards a grid at the bottom.

Your job is to hold the correct buttons and use the strum bar on the guitar when those circles hit that grid. Think of it as akin to a Dancing Stage game, only much better, and using your fingers.

So, reunited with my instrument of choice, I proceeded through the Career Mode, and promptly got stuck into the wave of brand new songs on the game’s tracklist. Opening up with Mötley Crüe and Wolfmother, continuing onto Nirvana and The Police…already Guitar Hero II blows you away with anthems that put that ‘other’ ‘rock’ party game Singstar Rocks to shame.

All but a few songs are covers, but to the untrained ear, you wouldn’t really even notice. That said, there’s nothing quite like rocking to the original master of Primus’ John The Fisherman. From Foo Fighters to Rage Against the Machine, Lamb of God, The Rolling Stones and Megadeth, there’s something for rock and metal fans.

The gameplay has also been noticeably tweaked for the better. Advanced techniques such as Hammer-Ons (using two or more adjacent ‘frets’ down the neck of the guitar using only one strum) and Pull-Offs (the same but going up the neck) are easier to achieve. The game also ups the ante with its difficulty setting: as before, the Easy mode only requires using the top three frets; Normal asks you to use four; Hard is a manic use of all five frets, making for a lot of fingerwork. Expert adds three-button chords to the mix.

Having said that, Guitar Hero II’s learning curve is almost faultless. Players of any skill level can begin playing the tutorials to understand the controls, ease further in using the Easy Career Mode, and then really rock-out(!) using more advanced techniques as the difficulty modes climb to Expert.

I easily mastered five-button control, as each track became progressively more challenging without being immediately overwhelming. This enabled me to kick someone’s ass at the game without resorting to actually hitting my opponent over the head with the (Gibson-a-like) SG Controller. Guitar assault is very rock and roll though.

When it comes to your on-screen character, there are plenty of good stereotypes to choose from from Pandora (whose youth is ‘shrouded in mystery’) via Eddie Knox (‘a real road dog’) to Lars Umlaut (‘Lock the doors and board the windows’, he’s Norwegian).

Your choice of guitar, however, is limited by the deal made by Activision to the Gibson range (including the Flying ‘V’, SG and Les Paul). Not that it really matters as the actual guitar tone is unaffected.