The Video Game Revue

Guitar Hero II

The Christmas season has been good to me in terms of gaming gifts. Ace-High hooked me up with the expansion set for World of WarCraft: The Board Game (called Shadows of War), and Sunny's family set me up with Trauma Center: Second Opinion, Yggdra Union, and Guitar Hero II. So far I haven't gotten around to all of it, particularly since I'm still playing a lot of World of WarCraft and getting back into FF XII.

I did finally have the chance to play Guitar Hero and its sequel as multiplayer games. The original Guitar Hero doesn't benefit a whole lot from multiplayer, in my opinion. The only available play mode is a "dueling guitars" style face-off which forces both players to play on the same difficulty level. That's fine if all you're aiming to do is to settle a grudge with somebody over who's the better Guitar Hero player, but Guitar Hero II takes the multiplayer concept much further with a co-operative multiplayer play mode. In the co-op mode, each song has a lead track and either a bass or a rhythm track depending on the song. One player plays lead, and the other plays back-up; it's very satisfying and does a great job of maintaining that illusion of actually playing the song that makes Guitar Hero such a fun experience in the first place.

One thing that I don't like about Guitar Hero II is the line-up of songs. Taste in music is extremely relative and it's easily possible that you'll disagree with me on this one, but the original Guitar Hero features tracks by bands like Slayer, Motorhead, Bad Religion, Audioslave, and Queens of the Stone Age. There was variety, but there was also a lot for me, personally, to care about. Guitar Hero II has less of that. Yes, there's Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" and a kick-ass Rage Against the Machine track too, but overall the track list feels weaker. One pleasant surprise that helps to make up the difference is the inclusion of the Trogdor joke song as performed by Strongbad--the cartoon character from Homestar Runner.

While I am not as emotionally invested in the songs from Guitar Hero II as the stuff that the first game offered, there is definitely one aspect of GH2 that makes up for it: the heightened difficulty level. Guitar Hero only pushes one so far, and although I've yet to exhaust the range of challenge that it provides, I have gotten to the point where there's really only a handfull of songs that really tax my abilities. Guitar Hero II shifts the challenge spectrum up a couple of notches so that I now have a fair amount of material to "skill up" on. I even expect GH2 to be a big help in improving my ability to the point where I can finally polish off the final tier on Expert difficulty in the original Guitar Hero.

In my opinion, if you're looking to get into Guitar Hero for the first time--especially if you're more of a punk or metal fan and less of a cheesy power-rock fan--then you should get the original game first and move into Guitar Hero II once you've gotten a lot of mileage out of the first one. If you're more focused on multiplayer play, however, you definitely want Guitar Hero II. Although I've talked about the strengths of the tracks here, I should also stress that it's all relative to your own tastes in music, and that you really should investigate the track lists for both games on your own before deciding whether or not Guitar Hero really has better music than Guitar Hero II.

Speaking of track lists and such, one thing I think that the producers of Guitar Hero seriously need to look at is releasing Guitar Hero titles focused on individual artists. For instance, if you took a single major band like, say, Nirvana, U2, or System of a Down (or Green Day, or Nine Inch Nails, or Soundgarden, or...), and produced a dedicated Guitar Hero title for that artist featuring their major singles and music videos, that game would sell like mad. One challenge I can see with that setup is that Guitar Hero and its sequel both feature a lot of tracks--Guitar Hero II has 55 in total--and it's hard to get so many from a single artist. One solution I can see working is to include a fairly exhaustive track listing for a single artist (like a boxed set) and charge more for it; I think Guitar Hero fans would still pay for it. Another simple solution is simply to include fewer tracks and maybe charge a little less for it. Even if such a game only included about 15 tracks, fans would still jump at it, especially for a little cheaper.

Of course, yet another obvious solution is to simply release genre-specific Guitar Hero compilations. "Heroes of Punk" or some such. Yet another solution is simply to get Guitar Hero III in the works already. :) As somebody who listens to music from time to time, however, I really like the idea of Guitar Hero releases centered around specific artists. I'd be mildly surprised if it actually happened, though.

posted by Parappa @ 12:50 PM