Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero is a multiplayer music video game from Play Station 2, developed by Harmonix Music Systems. It was launched in Europe on April 7 2006 and has won major awards from top video game publications. The game is played with a primary controller that has a distinctive shape of a Gibson SG. There are a series of characters with individual personalities to choose from. The main objective of the game is to replicate the notes of the song that’s playing on the Guitar Hero controller, by holding the right fret button on the guitar neck and at the same time ’strumming’ the strum bar. Each note played is worth 50 points and each chord bags 100 points. If 10 notes are played one after the other successfully, the point multiplier rises by an extra point. The points that each note carries is multiplied by that number. Star Power enables the player to double the points only for a short time, so the 4x point multiplier switches to 8x.

The game features 47 tracks out of which 30 are cover versions of original songs. The other 17 songs are sung by lesser known bands, most of them being from members of the Harmonix development team. Some well-known songs include ’Smoke on the Water’ by Deep Purple, ’I Wanna Be Sedated’ by The Ramones, ’More than a Feeling’ by Boston, ’Take Me Out’ by Franz Ferdinand, ’Killer Queen’ by Queen, ’Ziggy Stardust’ by David Bowie and ’Higher Ground’ by Red Hot Chili Peppers.