Been awhile since I’ve bought and played a really fun game on the Sony Playstation 2. A couple times I was tempted to pick up Guitar Heroes, but didn’t pull the trigger until yesterday when the sequel came out for $79.99 with red guitar and game.

You’ll note from the pictures below that the TV that our PS2 is hooked up to is dusty. I wish Guitar Heroes II (GHII) was available on the Xbox 360 in HD with digital audio surround sound. I suspect a version will be coming for the PS3 and I hope the existing guitar controller works.

(Unrelated PS3 launch note: they have already started waiting in line outside)

How the guitar controller works
The five colored buttons are a bit big and spaced apart to fit fingers. It’s especially difficult to stretch to the orange key which is furthest down the plastic neck. The guitar comes with an adjustable strap and the whammy bar is probably my favorite part. Hit a long note and you can warble the note with the whammy.

The guitar has kind of a sturdy, but still plastic feel. It doesn’t feel like a real guitar but isn’t completely cheap in construction. Maybe someday we’ll get a console game using a real guitar, now that would be cool. Having played guitar for nearly 30 years now, it’s not really like a guitar except in shape only.

Strumming the guitar is a process of pressing the correct colored button and moving the white strum button. For fast strumming it’s necessary to create a picking motion of up-down with the strum switch.

Enough already, unlock Black Sabbath, Guns N’ Roses and Skynyrd!
To unlock War Pigs by Black Sabbath and Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses and Freebird by Skynyrd, three of the funnest songs to play, you need to play through career mode with at least medium difficulty and get at least three stars. Freebird is the last song to master to beat the medium difficulty and the guitar solo is challenging. You’ll be asked to do a random encore performance and then these songs will be released. Once unloced you’ll be able to train on these songs.

To unlock the character Grim Reaper (my personal favorite so far), you need to earn $6,000 which can be done by playing through all the songs in career with medium difficulty. This game is loads of fun for the whole family and different than the typical button masher or slasher fest. Sort of Dance Dance Revolution meets Hendrix and well worth a play. If there is any downside it might be that you wish there were even more songs. This is a title begging for online download song expansion. Grade: A

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