Guitar Hero II

Tim's thoughts

Before the game arrived in the office, I’d never played Guitar Hero and to be honest, I’d never really come across it either. Having never played a guitar beyond just plucking strings and trying to make it sound like music, you could say I was a complete novice when I sat down with the game for the first time.

At first I sucked and I was consistently failing to complete songs before I’d got 50% of the way through. I put this down to my general clumsiness and inability to play anything resembling a musical instrument – it felt like I was trying to do the washing up without my thumbs. In other words, I was finding it tough from the outset and I hadn’t ventured past easy mode yet. I was doing even worse than Ryan and that’s not good in the grand scheme of things.

However, my early failings didn’t put me off wanting to become a Guitar Hero master.

I spent a couple of hours using the game’s inbuilt practice mode, getting used to the rhythm I needed to establish in the songs before gradually speeding it up. When I went back to playing songs in career mode, I was almost nailing them every time on easy mode, with my “notes hit” percentage up in the 90’s most of the time. That was in stark contrast to my initial failings and I was starting to really enjoy the game.

Much like Ryan, I found myself wanting to play the game when I should have been doing other, more important things (like writing yesterday’s feature – Ed). However, I didn’t find myself suffering from aches and pains after playing for 30 minutes or so – I could continue playing for an hour or so before tiredness kicked in.

Most of the songs were before my time, but being a fan of great music, I knew most either by name or after listening to the introduction. There were some notable omissions from the play list, but that didn’t put me off the game in the slightest. In fact, it wouldn’t have mattered if I didn’t know any of the songs because I just really got into the mindset that I needed to hit every note.

I have moved on from easy mode in most songs now, with only a couple being a complete nightmare for me on medium. I’m regularly hitting above 70% of notes on medium mode now, so you could say I’ve improved pretty quickly. I’ve probably played the game for no more than ten hours so far, but I’ve enjoyed every minute of it and can see myself going back for more over the weekend. I’m actually tempted to buy this one for home – that’s something I never thought I’d say!