Rocking out

I have been spending a lot of time the past two nights playing Guitar Hero 2. For the uninformed, it’s a video game where you have a guitar-like controller and you play along with famous rock songs. It’s the guitar equivalent of Dance Dance Revolution or Karoke. The controller itself is a pretty reasonable approximation of a guitar in that there’s a couple fret buttons, a strum button, and a whammie bar. You play chords by holding down several fret buttons at once, instead of contorting your fingers to hit all the strings. If it were too much more realistic, it would turn off all the people like me who can’t actually play guitar.

I played the original game back at Will and Leah’s Wedding. It was a lot of fun, but since I don’t own a Playstation 2 I didn’t spend much time thinking about it. Well now that David and I are moving in to one apartment, I have access to one. So Sunday night I bought it in anticipation. Tonight, I finished making my way through the 40 songs on medium mode. I was able to cruise through them pretty quickly despite not playing much before now. I was also concentrating on getting everything beat to unlock more songs instead of perfecting them.

Now that I’ve gotten all the way through and unlocked things, I need to start going through them again to get good so I can tackle hard mode. It’s a lot of fun to play. You forget you’re playing with a fake guitar and really get into playing along with these famous songs. So I have been enjoying it quite a bit and will be enjoying it a lot more in the future. I’m also looking forward to getting a second controller so we can play co-op mode with one person on lead and one on rhythm or bass. Hooray.