We could learn a song by Black Sabbath that wasn’t “Crazy Train.” (It was “War Pigs.”) We were far more welcoming of these classic tracks because music more modern for the time also saw representation. Junior high me was exposed to veteran classic rock acts like Cheap Trick and Rush. In fact, the tracklist is a great starting study of the different evolutions and digressions of the genre. In spite of this, the tracklist of GHII represented a decently diverse set of songs representing decades of rock music. Guitar Hero II featured 64 tracks (on the PlayStation 2 edition), and many of them were covers instead of master tracks. While online multiplayer has gotten far more reliable and enjoyable in the same ten years since Guitar Hero II ’s release, it just doesn’t have the same effect as a communal play session. At the risk of sounding much older than I am, there is something special about having a group altogether in front of the same game. Now, what we were experiencing was a mysterious thing that used to be far more ubiquitous called ‘local play.’ This setup allowed everyone to come together over a common interest and enjoy it all at once. We could rotate players more efficiently because two could play at the same time without feeling disadvantaged. For our Wal-Mart camping party, this was perfect. Another was competitive, but allowed individual players to select difficulty curves differently. One mode featured players taking on guitar and bass parts to work together to play through a song together. How does someone whose musical ability stretch past being able to count time actually play Guitar Hero II alongside far better equipped players? Guitar Hero II changed the way multiplayer worked in a way that allowed for players of any skill to join the fun. Thanks to a clever cheat code, we immediately had access to the entire library of songs and we would hammer away for two to three hours away a day. It didn’t take long for a friend to sort out that this was the actual game, which basically created a daily ritual for my group of friends: immediately after the prison of junior high let out, we’d make our way down to the Wal-Mart and set up camp around the Guitar Hero II display. Instead, someone decided to just put in the actual game into the demo display and let that be good enough. See, for some reason RedOctane didn’t send out a demo disc of Guitar Hero II to the store that was only ten minutes away from my school. Like many stories of junior high school, this one begins in a Wal-Mart. However, Guitar Hero II ended up making a large impact in my life as a gamer. Not being as musically talented, I wasn’t exactly great at the game. Many of my friends back then were in music classes, so I was exposed to Guitar Hero pretty early on in its life. For a period of time, the rhythm genre was the thing in video games to the point of breaking into the ‘casual’ market being dominated with the fresh release of the Nintendo Wii. If you’re in your mid-twenties like me, you probably have a lot of memories of the Guitar Hero series. Believe it or not, it has been ten years now since the release of Guitar Hero II, a game in which people live out their rock star dreams using Fischer-Price toys.
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