Throughout its relatively short development history, Harmonix has side-stepped that tricky issue of what makes a fun videogame in favour of simply finding the most accessible way for lay people to interact with music. While PS2 classics
Frequency and Amplitude certainly made a fair fist of this, challenging players to ‘activate’ instruments within tracks for predetermined stretches of time, nothing really compares to getting your axe out and waving it around the living room. Even if it is straight off the set of Teletubbies.

Cosmetic considerations aside, the concept’s so simple we’re surprised it didn’t debut on the MegaCD – taking your instrument in hand, strum away while holding the appropriate fret button(s) until either the song ends or you’re in hospital having reconstructive surgery on your wrists. Success is rewarded with an exponential high score and the chance to progress; failure with a rather unmusical clunk. Besides one major tweak made since the series’ first outing – the chance for two players to take on a track simultaneously, one covering rhythm, the other lead – that’s the bulk of what’s on offer
explained. Don’t mistake this fact for a lack of depth, though – Guitar Hero is just about the only game in existence in which running through the exact same five minutes of gameplay often proves more enjoyable than the first time around. What’s more, the overall breadth of music on show means that absolutely nobody will have the excuse of not having at least heard some of the soundtrack. From personal experience, we’re not even sure this matters anyway – after all, who hasn’t dreamed of playing to a sell-out crowd?

So, why the eight? Well, a combination of reasons, really. To begin with, there’s the cost angle – having to fork out not far off £100 for a twoplayer game of anything, undoubted quality aside, approaches Virtua-Racing-on- the-Mega-Drive levels of insanity. The second gripe ties in somewhat with the first – poor overall soundtrack quality, relative to the original game.
The stubborn might argue this is a matter of personal taste but, in reality, the opposite is true. Put simply, far too many tracks are included for their notoriety rather than how they can be adapted to the control system. Black Sabbath’s War Pigs springs to mind here, its anthemic political diatribe set against the backdrop of players sitting on their numb backsides, doing precisely nothing. Conversely, as things got tougher last time out, there were at least one or two tracks concerned
with allowing players to enjoy nailing skilful combinations, rather than being bombarded with an impregnable barrage of consecutive notes. David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust, in particular, caused much involuntary posing without the debilitating condition known as ‘joint rot’. Here, the ‘rhythm’ part of the genre is tossed out of the window with increasing frequency as
you resort to simply playing notes as quickly as possible, because that’s the only way to do so.

It’s all a terrible shame and one that could have been avoided quite easily by releasing some conglomerate title, bringing together the soundtracks of both Guitar Hero games into one bat-chomping whole. Making things worse, though, are the rumblings from the game’s development team about the practical certainty of the tracks from the original game eventually
being made available, as a paid-for Marketplace download. We’re all for adding content incrementally to avoid charging another £50 for a near-identical game, but companies taking extra cash on top of a starting 70 quid for proverbial old rope is quite another matter. At a push, 90 per cent of the code and assets Harmonix will need in order to include the original’s tracks in this release will be sitting on some hard drive in Cambridge, Massachusetts – the non-inclusion of at least some of them seems miserly at best.

All of this notwithstanding, Guitar Hero remains the greatest method of sending inhibitions packing that videogames can offer, making a constant mockery of whoever’s playing it as they’re laughed at for trying to insist it feels like your fingers are making sweet music. The truth is, though, that’s exactly what the game does to you. Much as the guitar (and by xtension, yourself) may look Fisher Price when in action, the experience is more Fabergé egg, causing everything outside of your television’s frame to disappear for the duration of each record, melting back into place when you’re told how well you rocked. An extra track will turn into a handful. A handful will turn into a dozen. When you’ve literally run out of favourite tunes, you’ll just get around the problem by simply going through the repertoire one more time. There are some things in
life that must be tried before they are bought. Guitar Hero II isn’t one of them. Turn on, tune in, rock out.

Dave Shaw