Guitar Hero Member Review for the PS2

A step up from air guitar.

Wow. Guitar Hero is one of the precious few games that comes along every now and again, that you cannot stop playing (or, as I refer to them, game crack). I played this game all day and all night for weeks. I once played for so long, I fell asleep in the middle of a song, and woke up with the guitar in my hand. Everyone I know played it. My friends played it, my relatives played it, even my mom played it.

Harmonix (developer of PaRappa the Rapper, and DDR) has created a game based on the formula of Konami's obscure rhythm game, Guitar Freaks. Colored notes scroll across the screen, and you hit the corresponding fret buttons on your controller while strumming. When you hit every note in certain sequences, you acquire star power, which increases the number of points you earn per note. How much money you earn per song depends on how well you play, and money can be spent on characters, guitars, and songs.

You get six groups of songs, five songs per group. After beating all five songs, you get to move on to the next group, and each group is harder than the last. You can play in four difficulty settings: easy, medium, hard, and expert. On Easy, the "conveyor belt" moves slowly , you get three different notes, and they come one at a time. On Medium, you get four notes, which come a little faster, as many as two at once. On Hard, all five frets are used, come relatively quickly, at as many as three at a time. Expert is the same as hard, but faster, with notes closer together.

All the songs are licensed (though covered), and include Jimi Hendrix's "Spanish Castle Magic", Stevie Ray Vaughan's "Texas Flood", Cream's "Crossroads", and Audioslave's "Cochise". While these are great, you will, as you can imagine, think "What? No Zeppelin?", or "No White Stripes", or whatever band you like.

The graphics are nice, but not particularly important to the game. I was pleasantly surprised to find that characters fingers moved with the notes.

However, using star power could be a little easier, and a few of the songs weren't covered well. Otherwise, the game's perfect.

If you spend half your time air-guitaring to your favorite song (like me), this is the perfect game for you. In fact, if you have ten fingers on each hand, you have no excuse not to buy this game.