Guitar Hero II (360) Impressions
I wasn't sure that this version of the game would feel any different than the PS2 versions I've played.Fortunately, I was wrong.
Please keep in mind that people have strong feelings about little plastic guitars and Guitar Hero in general. I know I do. So my impressions might not be your impressions, because some of the things I'm going to write about are incredibly subjective.
As to how much I've played, I finished Hard mode tonight. I made it through without failing a song, which I didn't expect, but all the practicing on Laid to Rest and Hangar 18 on Expert has made me a better player.
Some songs you just play, and some songs teach you how to play.
My total career score ranked me 98th in the world. Which means nothing, obviously, because there are only about 1,500 people on the online leaderboards right now. But it's still fun to say.
At first, I thought this version of the game had somehow been dumbed down in terms of difficulty, because I was absolutely ripping through songs, better than I've ever played on the PS2 version.
That's when I remembered something my friend John Harwood said about the HD delay on the PS2 version. There's an option in the game that enables you to calibrate input lag if you have an HD set (explaining that is another discussion entirely, but the very short version is that there might be a delay in milliseconds if you have certain types of HD sets). John said that he was almost certain that the lag was, at times, applied inconsistently.
I know that I've felt like I was missing notes at times when I was playing them correctly, but I chalked it up to me being a doof (again, Occam's Razor at work).
However, it doesn't feel like that on the 360 version. The response is dead-on. So now I'm thinking that John may well have been right.
On to the guitar. Some people hate this guitar. I am not one of them. It's the best guitar, by far, that I've ever used to play this game. It feels just slightly smaller, but I've measured several of the PS2 guitars and they're very similar in dimension.
There are two small differences, though--one, the button spread (distance from front of the green fret to the end of the orange fret) is 4 3/8" for the Gibson SG controller, but it's 4 1/2" for the 360 controller. And on the 360, the buttons are rectangular instead of arch-shaped.
None of that seems like it would make any difference, but the 360 controller feels absolutely great in my hands. It's quieter, too, at least compared to the Gibson SG.
One other guitar note: this guitar is more responsible when it comes to enabling Star Power. It's much easier for me to enable Star Power when I tilt the guitar.
Again, this is very subjective. I've seen people on forums complaining that the tilt sensor is actually much better in the PS2, but that hasn't been my experience at all.
As I mentioned previously, though, if you use the Start button to enable Star Power, you're in trouble. It's a much, much smaller button.
The song order has been tweaked to good effect. Now the difficulty for each set is much more consistent, and the progression is much more fine-tuned than it was in the PS2 version. And there are six songs in a set now instead of five.
As for the new songs in the 360, they're not particularly memorable on Hard difficulty. Well, except for The Trooper by Iron Maiden, which is very fun to play. I'm assuming, though, that songs like Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo (which everyone seems to love in the reviews) are probably much more fun on Expert.
Oh, and Billion Dollar Babies is a total wipeout. Not a good cover at all, and they totally missed the vibe of the song. It might be even worse than the cover of Heart-Shaped Box.
The leaderboards, of course, are awesome. I've seen one oddity, though--when I play offline, my scores for individual songs don't seem to be getting transferred to the leaderboards when I do go online. My Career score does--after I play one song. So I don't know if I'm just missing something, but I thought that was strange.
There were only 300 people on the leaderboards when I checked for the first time Friday night, so if you picked up the game at Circuit City on Friday (several of you did), you were one of the very first people in the country to pick up a copy.
By the way, the way they do total career mode score is very well-designed. They take your highest score for a song from any difficulty version, then add the best score for each song together to get your career total. This will result in endless strategizing by people trying to move up the leader boards.
One other thing about the 360 version compared to the PS2 version: it's so nice to have faster load times, faster save times, and faster everything.
Here's one story for you that I still can't believe: the aforementioned John Harwood, who is an excellent player, played through Hard level in one freaking day. One freaking sitting, actually--about five hours, I believe.
If you've played GHII, you know that it can be tiring after even thirty minutes. I don't think I ever play more than forty-five minutes at a time. How anyone can play for five hours straight is beyond me. I started calling John "Lobster Boy" because his hands must be claws now.
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