Reviewed by John Orr
December 2006
True story: A couple of years ago I had been practicing guitar in my home office and had just put my Gibson 335 on its stand when my little boy Riley walked in.
Riley is named for B.B. King (whose real name is Riley) and had already heard plenty of blues music by this time, when he wasn't quite 3 years old.
He walked up to my guitar, stood behind it with the neck over his shoulder like a double-bass, reached around to plunk the strings and sang in his best blues voice, "I got a owie ... I got a owie.''
So when "Guitar Hero" II for the PlayStation 2 arrived, I thought it might be fun to try it out with my family. We all love video games, and besides the PS2, we also have a ridiculous number of Nintendo games and a scattering of computer games.
Riley is 5 now and is good at a number of games that have "Mario," "SpongeBob" or "Legos" in their titles. His mother is great at "The Legend of Zelda the Windwaker" and his 13-year-old sister Yasemin is a video-games monster who has beaten most of the games in the house. Me? I pretty much peaked with Soleau Software's "Wall Pipe Game," back in the days of DOS.
But, using a different name, I am front man and second guitarist for a blues band that performs in the Bay Area, and thought it would be fun to compare playing Activision's "Guitar Hero II" to the real deal.
And the similarities are pretty fun. The best thing, really, is that when you play this game, you are sort of making music with a band, which is almost the most fun human beings can have on this planet.
You are the one hitting the notes on the little plastic guitar modeled after the Gibson SG (like the one Jack Black played in "School of Rock"), and if you can follow the visual cues on the screen well enough, something very much like Van Halen's cover of "You Really Got Me" or the Allman Brothers' "Jessica" screams back at you from the TV.
And like real musicianship, it takes plenty of practice. Players have as many as five operating buttons on the guitar neck and a strumming button on the guitar body. Colored note cues stream at you down an on-screen guitar neck and it takes plenty of coordination to hit and hold those notes at just the precise moment they are to be played.
Miss the game's timing and dead-string noises torture your ears, your on-screen avatar writhes in embarrassment and the audience yells a chorus of boos.
You start with three buttons and work your way up to the full five. Individual notes or chords, as cued by the game. There are different levels of difficulty. At the easiest level, you hit a single note and hear the game's guitarist doing all the hammering and chording for you. As you progress in difficulty, you have to do the hammering and chording.
At the advanced levels, it gets pretty freaky to see all those notes cascading toward you in a colorful, nightmarish challenge to your dexterity. It is not for the fumbly of fingers.
A nice touch in this update of the original "Guitar Hero II" game is how easy it is to go to practice mode. Having trouble with the medium level version of Heart's "Crazy on You" or Primus' "John the Fisherman''? Just switch into ''Practice'' mode, work on it a bit, then switch back to ''Career'' to continue your progress in the game.
For Yasemin -- the most intense gamer in our house -- the fun of it was in its newness. Instead of holding a PS2 or GameCube controller, she had a little guitar in her hands, and she had a whole new game to conquer. She progressed quickly, moving through levels and earning ''cash'' with which to buy new characters and guitar designs.
For Riley, Guitar Hero II is just too much for his 5-year-old hands. The game is rated "teen," presumably for its would-be rock raunchiness (which isn't really all that bad), but the real problem was just in getting those little fingers to stretch the long distances on the guitar neck -- just like with real guitars.
For me, it was just fun to see all the cute stuff programmed into the game, especially the pay statements from the rock clubs after nailing a song. ''Pay: $2,570," but then come the deductions: ''Windows, smashed: $340; Top shelf, imbibed: $1,790; Fights, initiated: $110; Bar stools, wielded: $180."
And the low-quality graphics are fun, although while playing you can't really pay attention to anything but those notes zooming toward you. But while watching someone else play it's amusing to see the tattooed, spiky-haired rockers on stage as flames burst from their hands. Or see the rat in the rafters in one of the cellar clubs.
But as blues guitarist myself, with years of playing music that is all about improvisation and personal creativity, I found it very difficult to learn to follow the visual cues instead of the musical cues.
Playing in a band is alive, it is organic, a song is a different creation every time it is played. Maybe you play a lead and you lag on the note just a little bit to give it an extra bit of soul, or you hit it a bit early to add a little excitement. Each song becomes your own, even if it's a cover of ''Crossroads'' that everyone has heard 3,852 times.
But with "Guitar Hero II,'' you have to hit the note exactly when the game's guitar player performed it, and can't rely on your own musical sense. It's weird. I sometimes close my eyes when I play guitar. That would be disaster in this game.
And, there is no real music-making at all, independent of the game. You can't just hit the five buttons and the strum bar and expect to play your own version of Lynyrd Skynyrd's ''Free Bird'' -- although that song is among the possibles in this game, if you can get that far, and your fingers are strong enough to keep you going through the song's nine minutes.
But that's OK. It's still a fun game; it just requires a different discipline than making music, and its own practice time.
And for me, that's the rub. When I have a little free time away from my day job, I am going to pick up my Gibson 335 and practice with it, rather than with the little plastic toy of ''Guitar Hero II.''
My band mates will be glad I practiced. But to them I offer this bit of wisdom from ''Guitar Player II'': ''If your singer ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.''
Update: The game we played so I could write this story had to go elsewhere, but at Christmas Yasemin received a copy of the game with a separate, wireless guitar controller that was modeled after the Gibson Flying Vee (Albert Collins made that model famous).
What we liked about it was the wireless function. It is great to play it without having wires trailing all over the place.
Below is a photo of something similar to what we ended up with.
