Guitar Hero 2 Updates: More songs and Practice Mode
Posted by inpheaux on July 31st, 2006 at 9:51 am
Two quick little bits of Guitar Hero 2 news today. First up, new songs! RedOctane showed off three new tracks in a new build of the game at an event yesterday . . or today . . or something in Australia. What do we get?
Stone Temple Pilots - Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart
Anthrax - Madhouse
Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil
Add these to the already announced set from just-before-E3 and you get the following presently known tracklist:
Anthrax - Madhouse
Black Sabbath - War Pigs
Butthole Surfers - Who Was in My Room Last Night?
KISS - Strutter
Motley Crue - Shout at the Devil
Primus - John the Fisherman
Reverend Horton Heat - Psychobilly Freakout
Rush - YYZ
Stone Temple Pilots - Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart
Van Halen - You Really Got Me
Drist - Arterial Black
10 tracks + 1 bonus. Pretty good so far. But there's a slight problem with that new set. The vocals on the cover of "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart" are weak. Really weak. "Spanish Castle Magic" weak, which was so bad that they ended up cutting the vocals from the game. Hopefully the nice guys at Harmonix, RedOctane and Wave Group know this already, and will respond accordingly.
It's also worth noting that it seems Harmonix is going nuts with 3 fret chords. From a short gameplay movie of "Trippin' on a Hole in a Paper Heart" IGN has, it seems like a very large portion of the song (on what I certainly hope is Expert Mode) is made up of nothing but 3 fret chords. It looks like our fingers are in for more punishment in November.
But hey, along with those never-ending strings of 3 fret chords we'll be getting a Practice Mode. Gamespot got the scoop on this new feature late last week. As we already knew (or could have guessed), Practice Mode lets you start any track on any difficulty level starting at any point. Each track is now chopped up into individual sections based on what they are: Intro, Lead, Verse 1, Chorus 1, Solo 37, etc, and you can either choose to play one distinct section (like the solo) or choose a start and end point to practice through. The latter will probably be nice for practicing songs with multiple solos like Guitar Hero's finger-breakers "Cowboys from Hell" and "Bark at the Moon".
In addition to being able to pick your section and difficulty, you have the ability slow down the actual song with three levels of slowdown. In normal speed it will play just like it would in the normal portion of the game on whatever difficulty you picked. In the slower speeds everything except the Guitar track gets cut out, and replaced with a drum machine / metronome to keep time. It has to be done this way because the track is actually getting slowed down and therefore distorted, and you don't want to listen to a pitch-distorted singer while you're trying to practice, do you?
Guitar Hero 2 is still slated to launch this November on the PS2. Everything seems on track for it, too, so we shouldn't be expecting any delays. We're a mere ~3.5 months away from release now, so further details about the game should be ramping up as we near the release.
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