Amazing.  Practice really does make perfect!

I’ve been a huge Harmonix fan ever since Frequency, but on Frequency and Amplitude there was always a bar of difficulty I couldn’t cross.  I would ace the single player game on both easy and medium, and then hit the bar in the middle of Hard and progress no further.  In both Frequency and Amplitude, Hard mode meant there might be extra notes you could barely hear in the music, and you had to play 16th or 32nd notes on a single button.  That’s hella hard when pushing buttons on a PS2 control pad.  Also, if there was one especially hard part in the middle of the song, you couldn’t just practice that part of the song.  You had to survive the whole song to clear it, and play all the way through up to the point you were having trouble with to try that again.  It was really a shooter, albeit disguised as a music game, and eventually my reflexes just couldn’t take that much abuse anymore.

I haven’t had much time with Guitar Hero on the PS2, but the DS version has definitely fixed the game and made it more like playing a musical instrument.  When you fail a song in Career Mode, it gives you the option to switch to Practice Mode.  (The option is also in the main menu of the game, so you can start a play session with practice.)  In Practice Mode, you can choose any section of the song and have just that section play over and over until you hit Start to bring up the restart-or-quit menu.  And it tells you how many of the notes you played right!  So you know that practicing is actually helping!

Also notable:  playing 16th and 32nd notes doesn’t suck anymore because you can actually strum on the DS touch screen.  My wrists are most grateful, though my left hand is getting a little bit more exercise than it is used to from fingering all those chords.  I’ve gotten to the point where the game is giving me three finger chords and making me switch from 1st and 3rd to 2nd and 4th “frets” a lot.

Last week, I was stuck on “Breed” by Nirvana on Hard.  This week, I finished Bloc Party’s “Helicopter” and am currently working on “I Wanna Rock and Roll All Night” by Kiss.  I’m averaging one or two songs on Career Hard mode and a whole venue in Guitar Duels Medium each day.  I didn’t pass the Kiss song today, but I did go from 20% to 80% completion in just an hour.  So, I’m fairly confident I will clear it tomorrow.