Guitar Hero II review

Why is the difficulty so important? Well, because the best change in Guitar HeroII is its Practice mode. In the last game, you'd often ace the early riffs of a song only to come a finger-mangling cropper on an extended solo ten seconds before the end.

Because you'd only get the chance to practice it once in five minutes of play, sometimes you wouldn't even be able to work out what was going on, so you'd never get any better. This is not a problem in Guitar Hero 2. Instead of just slapping in a never-fail option, Red Octane has included a comprehensive Practice mode that lets you loop any part of a song - verse, chorus, bridge or solos - and strum until it's hard-wired into your hands.

Above: There are song-specific star poses. All are incredibly cool

If a solo's proving particularly challenging, you can slow it down to one of three speeds, then build your way up until you're rocking the plastic frets like a Vaseline-smothered Eric Clapton. It might sound like a minor change, but to serious players it's huge - suddenly, hitting the magic 100% on Expert sounds almost feasible, and frustration is eliminated at a stroke.