I've not had that much play-time on the Xbox 360, and most of what I have had has been Gears of War or Halo 2, so it was nice to be able to spend an afternoon on one today - on a widescreen HDTV at that. First to the bat (or controller, as we're calling it these days) was Guitar Hero II. Now surprisingly for someone mostly concerned with the PC I have played this before, and on a Playstation 2 nontheless. I can of course confirm that the 360 version looks better, but with this game it's not about the looks - which is certainly nice to say in this world of HD, pixel shaders and DirectX 10. The game uses a special controller shaped not surprisingly like a guitar. It has 5 buttons on the fret board and a little clicky thing to strum where you'd normally hit the strings. You choose from one of the many rock songs (noting that unless you're into older guitar music you won't have heard of that many of the songs) and then go about playing it.

The actual game is a sort of Dance Dance Revolution style affair. The 'notes' come towards you on one of five lines (coloured green, red, yellow, blue and orange). You press the button for that note and strum as the note reaches the bottom of the screen. Sometimes you'll have to press on more than one note at a time, sometimes the notes will be held and you get points for wobbling a wah-wah handle. Once you've played well for a certain time you can wave the guitar around to turn on "star power" which makes everything go blue and flashy and you get more points. Conversely if you muck up to many notes (either hitting the wrong buttons or strumming at the wrong time) you'll loose the attention of the crowd (indicated by a gauge at the bottom of the screen) and should you fall too far below their expectations you're booed offstage.

As the difficulty level changes you get more notes to play (and the orange fret isn't used at easy difficulty) and more notes to play at the same time. Added to this the crowd will be more picky, to the level that on Extra Hard it's possible to be booed offstage if you absent-mindedly pick at the strumming button before the song begins. There is a practice mode if one is finding it too hard, this allows you to practice any song, section-by-secion if you wish, and change the speed to allow you to get the rhythm right. Once you've mastered making sure your fingers stay in the right place on the buttons and get the rhythms you'll get more points, more stars and a place on the high score tables (unless your friends are all better than you). I've not had a chance to try out the Career mode, but I did see that you get to customise the look of your band - one of the ones I played with had a lead guitarist that looked like Buzz Lightyear had joined Slipknot and got himself a mask. It's a fun game, innovative too, and I just wish they'd bring out a PC version. Additionally, I wish that playing it for a while didn't make it appear like everything else in the room was "zooming in" to the extent that blinking repeatedly was required.