Guitar Hero 2 for the Xbox 360

From as early as I can remember, I have loved music. Driving around with my dad or uncle, we would play a game called “Who’s This?” where a song would come on the radio, they would say “who’s this?” and I would have to answer. More often than not, I would get it right.

Music was a driving force in my family. My dad played clarinet and had a fantastic record collection, ranging from early Miles Davis to classical to Elvis Costello to The B-52s. He has seen The Cramps three times. The man has taste. He turned me on to so many good bands, several of which I still listen to today. His father was a child prodigy on piano, playing jazz and classical concerts from a young age. My maternal grandmother also plays piano, only preferring ragtime, and cello. My mother doesn’t play anything, but she has great taste. She loves English blues, stuff like The Paul Butterfield Blues Band and John Mayall and The Bluesbreakers. Early J Geils Band, way before Centerfold and Freeze Frame, was on constant rotation in the house. In fact, the first instrument I learned to play was harmonica. I was eight or nine. I wanted to be Magic Dick (on the lickin’ stick!), mouth harp player for J Geils, so very badly. Motown and oldies were on all the time, too. The Righteous Brothers and Sam Cooke come on somewhere now and I flash back to driving around with my mom, headed off to nowhere in particular.

For my eleventh birthday, I received a video called Van Halen-Live Without A Net. Eddie Van Halen instantly changed my life. The magic he could perform with his hands blew me away. The solo on that tape… To this day, I watch it and I have no idea how he does half of it. From that moment, I wanted to play guitar. So, one month later, for Christmas, my dad got me a Synsonics guitar that had a tiny four inch speaker built into it. It ran off of a nine-volt battery and came from Toys ‘R Us. It was a piece of junk and I absolutely loved it. He also got me lessons from a local music shop, to which I went to a whopping total of two. That second lesson, when my teacher told me to practice “Born On A Bayou”, I said forget this, went downstairs, bought a tablature book of Led Zeppelin’s Greatest Hits, and never returned. I didn’t want to play Creedence Clearwater Revival; I wanted to ROCK!

Time passes and I become a decent guitar player. I excelled at rhythm but could not play lead other than your basic box scale. In my first band, FERN, I was thirteen and didn’t care. The three of us would go to the TV studio our drummer’s dad owned and turn up as loud as possible. We wanted to be James Gang, but, other than John, who was a fantastic drummer, we had a little stumbling block called ability. We sounded more like a trashy punk band. All three of us were influenced by great three-piece bands: Rush, James Gang, Mountain, et al. After a couple of years, we got to be pretty good. I was the defacto singer, but none of us owned a mic or PA, so all the songs ended up being very heavy, jammy instrumentals, like early Kyuss without the powerhouse vocals of John Garcia. There were “lyrics”, stuff one of us had written and I knew what they were. I just never sang them.

I never got the hang of solos, but I am starting to. Recently, a new addiction has entered our household: Guitar Hero, specifically Guitar Hero 2 for the Xbox 360. My wife and I have owned both the first and second games for PS2, but I just couldn’t seem to get the hang of them. I enjoyed them immensely, but getting past medium difficulty was no fun. Co-op play on GH2 was a blast, though. With choices of guitar/bass or lead/rhythm, depending on the song, two people can rock out to their hearts content. Single player hard difficulty eluded me, though, and, as a result, boredom set in.

The Xbox 360 version is another matter entirely. Ten new songs, including Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper”, brings the total up to seventy, with downloadable song packs available. Oh, and those song packs are not free. They come in three-song packs at a cost of $6.25. And they are songs from the first Guitar Hero. People went online and complained bitterly. They said it was a rip-off, being that they were already on PS2, and that they wanted the ability to pick and choose what songs they could purchase, as not everyone wanted to be forced to buy an Incubus song. Me? I went online and happily bought them. For one, the visuals are much cleaner than on the old system. Also, I could understand the slightly higher price point. Red Octane had to go back and add more code, since each song would have an entirely new play mode, co-op, which wasn’t on the first one. That means they had to program either a bass line or rhythm line. That means more work on their part. Finally, according to Microsoft, they had to rebuy the licensing rights, which add to the overhead. What the complainers online fail to realize is that Red Octane didn’t have to do any of this.

Another thing I feel in the minority over is the new guitar controller for the Xbox 360. I like the X-plorer shape and how solid the overall feel of it is. The buttons have a stiffer feel to them and slightly spaced out farther. One complaint I always had about the PS2 version was that the controllers felt too toy-like, almost like I was going to snap them in half on Hangar 18.

The strangest thing about playing this game constantly is that my fretting hand has become considerably stronger. When I play my real guitar (black Epiphone flying V), my fingers are noticeably faster, causing me to try leads for the first time in my life. Actually, I have demoed GH2 to three guitar player friends and all three went out and bought it. It’s an excellent warm-up and strengthening tool.

GH2 is also one of the greatest party videogames ever made. It is tactile in a way that regular controllers can never be. I would be more comfortable showing my mom this game. An Xbox 360 controller would confuse her. A guitar she would get. It also makes you silly. We have a standing rule to do overhead handclaps during the second verse of Warrant’s “Cherry Pie” when there is no guitar line. Finally, it is something anyone could play. With GH2’s diverse line-up of songs and five different difficulty levels, anyone from my ten year old cousin to the lead guitar player of my buddy’s band, The Killjunkies, can find something for their taste and ability.

If only I had this when I was eleven.