Guitar Hero II !!!!! (plus a warning)

[Guest caffeinejunkie]

Jordan is near impossible on Expert from all that I've read at the Guitar Hero forums.

 

Gonna do some more Xbox360 tonight methinks

 

gonna pick some popular songs to record though. While Jordan and Six are a couple of my favorites, I'd rather show songs that people recognize (like Stevie Ray Vaughn for AndyT if they release it on Xbox Live)

 

Beating Jordan requires weeks of practice mode and using full star power somewhere after about 60%. I've seen at least one guitar controller get broken over that song.

 

What I wanna know is why they re-recorded all the songs that you have to play to beat it but left all the ones you buy original? Some of the re-recordings sound okay but whoever did Mother and Killing in the Name of needs to be shot.

 

edit: I meant the singing the playing sounds fine

[powsmowl]

i got it..and i suck at it..its a totally different type of skill than giving 100yd headers with the m4 :cool:

[Angry_Games]

ok, so our local pro hockey team (Idaho Steelheads) is in the Conference Finals...meaning if they can beat Alaska, they'll play for the Kelly Cup (ECHL's version of the Stanley Cup) again.

 

So what do pro hockey players do when not actually playing hockey?

 

Why, they annoy me to death with their need to play Guitar Hero...

 

Saturday I had to fix two laptops for the boys, and while they sat around (listening to me yell at them for busting up their laptops with viruses, spyware, assorted other bits of nonsense), we got into the groove playing some Guitar Hero 2 on the Playstation2 (we'd have played on the Xbox360 instead, except one of the guitar controllers died suddenly and without warning grrrrr).

 

 

From left to right are Taggart Desmet, John Lammers, and B.J. Crombeen.

 

 

 

B.J. Crombeen is also featured here in this picture, taken at the game last night in Alaska, kicking the crap out of some Alaska jerk while Alaska's goalie is probably looking on in horror under his goalie mask hahaha:

 

 

 

I have already threatened to rat them out to their coach if they lose this series...and coach, he's a guy who isn't too understanding about his boys fooling around playing Guitar Hero instead of practicing their skating, meditating, or whatever hockey dorks do to get themselves ready for huge playoff games:

 

 

(yeah, coach is the guy throwing the punch, not the little sissy boy getting punched...and coach is an ex-NHL'er with fists that are like big square steel bricks...)

 

 

Now my blackmail is complete...I demand not only a Kelly Cup championship win, but now I'm thinking I want...some hot groupie hockey stalker-chicks (they are no different than rockstar groupies), a couple of jerseys, and a small chunk of those huge NHL contracts these boys will be signing at some point in their career mwahahahahaha!

[Angry_Games]

(saved from my post at GH forums)

 

 

this must be causing some sort of stir for Activision/Harmonix/Red Octane or whoever is now in control of things...there hasn't been any more DLC offered since the initial 3 songs and a good number of us began complaining about it (and nearly 10,000 signatures were forwarded to someone in charge).

 

I'm still waiting for my 1600 MS points card from Circuit City, 30+ days after purchase.

 

I've got one dead guitar and a brother with a dead console and guitar. (Xbox360).

 

I think I've also lost interest. Oh I'll continue to play the game on my Xbox360 when the guitar gets replaced (that is already like pulling teeth). I'll still play it more on my PS2 with both Guitar Hero 1 & 2 and miss out on the 8 new songs for the 360, all but 2 of which I could care less about.

 

Until Rock Band comes out...hopefully. EA might do just as horrible of a job coordinating it all, but it sure sounds promising what we've heard so far.

 

And this oft-talked about GH3 80's edition or whatever it is that is coming for PS2. I'm pretty sure I'll snag that too as I've got a PS2, both GH games, two fine wired guitars with 10' extensions, and there's no DLC for 'em to worry about.

 

But I doubt I'll ever pay another dime for DLC nor any new retail games themselves from this franchise for the Xbox360. However, I'm pretty forgiving, knowing how slowly the corporate wrench can get turning to smooth things over and make them right. For all we know, they've spent this 30 days shouting at each other and reps from every company including Microsoft themselves on what the ^%$#@$#@ to do about this snafu.

 

Bollocks! you say. A 'few' users here whining about these things, companies don't care, they've already snatched your cash, etc.

 

Here's the reality. Companies don't like bad press. Any self-respecting company that is, and I have to admit that Red Octane and Harmonix and Activision and even good ol' Evil Microsoft, these guys are all in the business of good press. (MS especially, they'll fight to squash bad press in a variety of ways from super-friendship down to possibly mob-hits lol). I've worked for the last few years on the internet for a big company myself, in a niche forum with around 29,000 members for support and marketing. The company would panic when 3 customers showed up claiming this or that (burned my house down, burned out my $1000 cpu, burned out my $500 video card, burned out my $300 RAM, etc).

 

If the problem was real, you could expect upwards of 20 customers showing up, sometimes pretty damned angry, that they just blew $1000+ on all these parts, including our company's part, all top-end stuff, and it didn't work. Twenty customers with the same problem, a quarter or even half of them angry and impatient that something be done RIGHT %#@$#@ NOW!!!, was an ugly deal. The company panicked in the first few days, then burned the midnight oil until a fix was found.

 

Imagine then a few times that over 100 customers all showed up with the same problem. And these 100 customers, a lot of them were forum members at much larger forums like Anandtech, HardOCP, XtremeSystems.org...big huge forums that got a lot more attention than our modest one-company-only-support-forum-with-20,000-ish-members (at the time). Imagine when a reviewer on top of this got one of these problematic parts. With the mentality of the internet lowering everyone's IQ by a pretty decent percentage, others who were just reading would see all of these guys complaining about this defective part (or god knows whatever else they were complaining that was defective or they didn't like), would then take the torch and spread it on, with the "yeah man, don't buy that part, lots of dudes in all these forums say its bad for all these reasons" and pretty soon, the guy that was just told that tells that the next two guys who want to buy the same thing. Like a virus almost, the bad press spreads.

 

But Angry, that was just your company!

 

Well, the answer to that is no. The company I worked for was pretty small player compared to the larger companies. AMD, Intel, ATI, Nvidia, OCZ, Corsair, and all of the companies on down the line, MUCH larger market shares and much more at stake each new product that launched, they feared the bad press even more. Especially companies who were on the fast track to becoming a Tier1 player. Bad press could almost ruin them at worst case scenario, or always keep them from ever breaking into the bigtime.

 

A heck of a lot of companies that I worked closely with or worked with those that did work closely with. The bad press that this is generating for Guitar Hero franchise may seem small and trivial to some of you who can't seem to understand why there are so many of us vocal about not only the price of the DLC, but of the substandard quality of a lot of guitars and really the customer service at Red Octane (who want you to fill out RMA forms online, but the form only returns an error when you submit, so you contact them by email and tell them the problem and give all the info you had in the form, then they just email you back saying "it's fixed, fill out the online RMA again, and you try again, and it gives you the exact same error as before, no matter which browser, computer, or internet connection you try, and then they finally tell you via email they accept your RMA and want the original receipt, and then you try to explain that the original receipt is still tied to Circuit City, waiting for my MS points card from the bundle purchase that I never received yet, and 30+ days later I'm still calling twice a week and being told they aren't in yet...and that's really besides the point since the game is only 30-ish days old and I'm filing for RMA so how could you even worry that I might be scamming you in asking for my guitar to be fixed or replaced???). But the fact that not only are there 35+ pages to this thread in the 'official' GH forums where people are complaining, there are plenty of other forums where lots of users are complaining about the same thing to the point that the major gaming sites have picked up the rumblings and ran them as legit news stories (and they are legit).

 

Many a review I've read have questioned, just like those of us here have, the high price of the DLC.

 

Which brings me to the end of my long point. Corporations move slowly. They celebrated the first week of release and watched sales climb. Then when they put up the DLC, that's when the complaining started about it, and about that time the guys with all the whammy problems and non-functioning strum bars and buttons were creating a cacophony of outraged cries. So as I stated earlier, we can HOPE that the nearly 10k signature petition, the ruckus raised around this forum and others, as well as the grumblings of reviewers and other top end sites caused everyone to gather around in a meeting room for the last few weeks trying to figure out how the heck to make it right for all existing customers as well as save face and be able to release more DLC that is comparable in price to what the ruckus-raisers demand is fair. I mean, you can't release new content for $1 a song. The 13k or so of us that sold out and bought a pack or two (or all 3, but I only wanted the Ozzy tune, and I thought, and still do, that my 1600 points will arrive one day) and showed up here to complain would howl about it (and then I'd agree that you naysayers would have real reason to tell us to shut our cake-holes). Worse, what if they lowered the prices on the new as well as the existing DLC? Then us 13k howler monkeys would start flinging poo and screaming and jumping bar to bar in our cages until we keeled over dead. Wouldn't you?

 

So how to save face and bring it all home properly?

 

I think a lot of the problem exists because of the quick-changeover to Activision. I'm not saying they are all standing around pointing fingers at each other (and/or Microsoft). I think it probably lies more in the area of getting all involved parties to all come to an agreement that satisfies the overwhelming majority of not only customers and potential customers, but satisfies all of the business parties involved as well.

 

That's a lot of ego and plenty of barriers, I've no doubt.

 

I'll wait it out another 30 days (until my Xplorer guitar's warranty ends...60 days??? ouch) and see if these companies will do the necessary things to appease at least me as a customer. Hopefully the rest of the screaming monkies in here (and c'mon naysayers...wouldn't you secretly be happy to find out that now DLC prices are lower, more reasonable, and RO was replacing all the defective guitars without any hassle?) will be appeased also, but I've dealt with enough people on the internet that I can say truthfully that there's no possible way to please everyone. An overwhelming majority is a major victory, but even just a majority is still a win-win situation. At least it shows some progress.

 

But I'm REALLY looking forward to Rock Band, and still pretty stoked for the PS2's GH3 or 80's edition or whatever it is. I'll just be done with RO/Guitar Hero on 360 for good, and if Rock Band satisfies my every need, I won't have reason to purchase even the PS2 versions, should there be more, of anything RO/Guitar Hero.

[OsamaBinAthlon+]

I just bought from Newegg for 360.

Any suggestions for mods to do to the guitar?

Would you say the PS2 is a much higher quality version?

[Angry_Games]

I just bought from Newegg for 360.

Any suggestions for mods to do to the guitar?

Would you say the PS2 is a much higher quality version?

 

the PS2 guitars have been out for a couple of years and so has the PS2 itself so you won't see much if any at all in the problems department.

 

The 360 is the higher quality version since it is the exact same game as the PS2 but with 720p HD graphics and over-priced downloadable content

 

GH3 is coming this fall for PS2, but Rock Band from EA is the big one for 360 that we are waiting for (guitar, bass, drums, and microphone + internet play!)

[OsamaBinAthlon+]

Well I got it today from the egg. And I am HOOKED.

This game rocks.

Came out to like 95 bucks for it after shipping. But wow. Seems worth it.

After playing for a while I swear I got like tunnel vision. Everything looked to be shrinking towards the center of my screen when I returned to the main menu.

[Angry_Games]

now just get another guitar and play some co-op with your buddies etc....its an insane blast!!

[red930]

Well I got it today from the egg. And I am HOOKED.

This game rocks.

Came out to like 95 bucks for it after shipping. But wow. Seems worth it.

After playing for a while I swear I got like tunnel vision. Everything looked to be shrinking towards the center of my screen when I returned to the main menu.

 

Does your whammy bar work fine? Mine didn't.. had to open it up and mess with its mechanism. Hell, this game is awesome. I'm addicted to the Guns and Roses song "Sweet Child of Mine". 99% hard, 97% expert. Good times. Even got my dad hooked on it too. He went out and bought some things to hook the thing up to our mixer that controls the sound system.

 

Any of you ever beat Jordan?

[OsamaBinAthlon+]

whammy bar works great on mine

and how are you guys so damn good

I can barely handle medium granted it is my first day and I never touched a guitar

If you have two someone plays bass is that how it works?

[Angry_Games]

whammy bar works great on mine

and how are you guys so damn good

I can barely handle medium granted it is my first day and I never touched a guitar

If you have two someone plays bass is that how it works?

 

depends on the song...some songs are bass/guitar, some are lead/rhythm guitars

 

I've had the game on PS2 since the day GH2 came out for it, last november or such I think, plus I've been playing real guitar for about 15 years so that is sort of a help heh

 

 

Jordan = never played it on hard yet, can do 95%+ on Medium

 

Sweet Child O' Mine = first song I ever practiced, now I can nail the intros and a lot of the solo on Hard, but the HO/PO section at the beginning of the solo kills me

 

(ps OBA, HO = hammer-ons, PO = pull-offs...real guitar players do it and it means if you say see a green then immediately a red then immediately a yellow all come up, you can hit the strum bar once at the green note, and while holding the green note, 'hammer-on' your finger to the red note (without hitting strum bar), and then hammer-on your next finger to the yellow note (without hitting the strum bar).

 

Same is for pull-offs, you would just reverse that scenario. For non-guitarists it can be tricky, but once you learn it, it will allow you to ROCK all the way through Hard (well, most...I'm stuck on Psychobilly Freakout on Hard grrrr).

 

There's a song that you can unlock called "Six" and in the solo, my buddy can do an entire probably 40+ note section of the solo with pure HO/PO's, hitting the strum bar only once at the beginning of the solo, and I've seen a vid on youtube of a guy pretty much doing the same thing on the Ozzy song (have to buy it Downloadable Content on 360, it's from Guitar Hero 1 on PS2).

[Angry_Games]

80's edition coming in June or July!

 

(click my sig image!)