Well one of the things I was waiting for arrived this morning and that was Guitar Hero II. I’m not totally impressed with its delivery though. It came and the jiffy bag it was in looked like it had been scraped along something like a wall of a concrete floor. In other words I could see into it, which isn’t good to start with. I thought it was just the jiffy bag but no, whatever’s happened to it has affected the box of the game too as the top corner along the spine looks like it’s been attacked with a sander for a brief period of time. If play.com were an eBay member I’d probably leave neutral feedback for the item because despite this the game is perfect; there’s no damage to the contents of the box and the game plays perfectly so because of this I see no point returning it. No biggie I guess but I know it’s something that’s going to irk me, I can just tell.

So now is the point when I bore you all over the game’s details. Stop reading now if you’re not interested because I’m not gonna be writing anything else tonight.

Let’s start with the basics. The game is split up into sections each containing a handful of songs with each section getting harder as you go along. Allegedly. The major thing that I noticed about this game was the difficulty of it. I’m not saying it’s stupidly hard - if anything, I’m saying the opposite. See my first experience of Guitar Hero was Guitar Hero III where even now I struggle to get five stars on the easy setting for all the songs yet this is exactly the opposite of my experience with II. I’ve gotten up to the 6th section of the game on ‘easy’ and so far achieved five stars in every song I’ve completed. Challenging it is not. Ok, maybe it’s not fair to judge a game based on the easy setting so take this: I played a song from the 6th section (the third hardest) on medium and the first time round I still managed four stars and if I’m honest, I barely even tried.

However, whilst it might not be too challenging it does have an awesome soundtrack. It has some of my favourite 80s metal songs: Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue, Cherry pie by Warrant and You Really Got Me, which is credited to Van Halen because it features Eddie’s guitar solo. I’ll be honest though, the main reason for buying it was one song in particular and that’s Rock This Town by the Stray Cats cos I just love the Stray Cats and a good bit of rockabilly. In fact, I played through the first five sections today on ‘easy’, that’s 15 songs at least, just so I could play it. It is a good song though and so worth the wrist ache.