Hammer-on and pull off
In Guitar Hero II you can use the joypad, but it doesn’t offer the same effect as using the X-plorer guitar. For the rather steep price of £69.99, you get the game, the X-plorer guitar controller, an adjustable strap and a sticker sheet to de-face the guitar. The guitar is based on the Gibson X-plorer guitar, only you won't find a rosewood fingerboard, or a sexy mahogany neck here; instead it's set in a clean white plastic coating. There are 5 frets each of which has a coloured coded button, a strum bar, which can be moved up and down with your thumb, a d-pad, and an Xbox guide button, allowing you to move through the menus with ease. The shape of the guitar is a perfect ergonomic fit, it feels comfortable to hold and the whammy bar and buttons are all in a great position ensuring that your fingers can reach the right places with ease. The guitar also sports a port, in which I hear we'll be able to insert an effects pedal peripheral that should be released shortly.
Click for larger imageThe idea of the game is a very simple one, but superbly effective. So much so, that every single note and chord is so accurately mapped to the guitar that it really does feel as if you're playing the tracks. On screen there is a vertical conveyor belt which consists of five different coloured sections that relate to the coloured frets on the X-plorer guitar controller. As the music plays the conveyor belt scrolls down and coloured nodules appear on the screen representing the notes and chords on the selected song. As soon as each coloured nodule hits the bottom bar on the screen you need to press the relevant fret on your guitar in order to hit the note. In easy mode, the nodules are fragmented so you won’t play every single note in a song, but you'll still get a good feel of the rhythm and play the most important notes. Whack it up to medium or the higher difficulty levels and you’ll play every single note in a song.
Click for larger imageThere are a number of guitar techniques which are used if you do play in the guitar in the game, and you can execute hammer-ons and pull offs to help you get through hard note sequences more smoothly. All of these techniques are explained in an excellent tutorial.
In career mode you take to the road with your band, travelling across different cities to increasingly larger venues. Choose your player, your instrument and then you'll start off in a battle of the bands competition, in a small high school venue. You begin career mode playing opening licks, such as Nirvana's 'Heart Shaped Box' or Kiss's 'Strutter', but as you progress you'll encounter tracks that will test your timing and co-ordination skills to the max as you battle to keep up with the likes of 'Stop' by Jane's Addiction or Aerosmith's 'Last Child'.
In each venue you play four or five songs, and if they're all successfully completed the crowd begins to slow hand-clap, encouraging you to play an encore before you leave the venue and head off up the motorway to your next gig.
