Guitar Hero II: Practice Mode
The opening two riffs of "Carry Me Home" on Hard are ninety-eight notes of hell.Absolute hell.
I played through the first thirty-one songs on Hard without any failures. It wasn't stylish, but I kept getting through. Thirty-one songs and I hadn't seen anything that I couldn't muddle through.
I got booed off the stage in Carry Me Home in the first fifteen seconds.
This is exactly what happened to me last year with Cowboys From Hell on Expert--an opening riff that was just suicidal. And the riffs have some common elements--incredibly fast, runs up and down, and almost no chords.
Last year, I was screwed. I'm still one song away from finishing the game on Expert.
This year, I can go to practice mode. When you fail a song, they even put "practice" as one of your options, and you can go directly to practice mode for that song. Nice design.
When you get to practice mode, here's what you do. First off, you select the starting and ending sections you want to practice (most songs have ten or so sections). Then you select the speed--normal, slow, slower, slowest.
"Slowest" is mud slow--I can't imagine anyone wanting a slower speed than that for practice. So while it would be nice to have a "speed meter" that would let you select track speed in one percent increments, for example (like Dan Gendreau's excellent VGS Player), the mode still works very well.
Practice mode accomplishes two things extremely well: it helps you learn some very complicated riffs, and it also provides you with some sense of progress, even if you're failing the song. Since you receive an accuracy percentage each time you play a practice section, it's easy to measure your progress, even if you're not ready to play the song at full speed.
What practice mode has also done, along with the relaxed timing of hammer ons/pull offs, is enable the inclusion of note sequences that are more difficult than anything in the first game.
Based on ninety-eight notes of hell, anyway. And I haven't even gotten to Expert.
One more note: when you miss a note in GHII, you get more feedback than you do in GH. The screen shakes just a little and you hear this kind of clunky song. It's a little more obvious than in the first game, and it's an improvement.
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