Guitar Hero II Coming to 360

Eurogamer reports that Guitar Hero II is coming to 360 at some indeterminate time in the future. From the article: "'The tour will continue the rockin' gameplay Guitar Hero fans have come to enjoy, and will now include expanded Xbox 360 capabilities,' according to RedOctane president Kai Huang. Who sounds pretty hip. Well, I think that sells the console pretty much single-handedly. Sony: it's SO OVER. 'With Guitar Hero II for Xbox 360 rock rhythm, lead, or bass guitar tracks with downloadable content and the new X-Plorer controller, designed specifically for the Xbox 360.' Woo! Yeah!" All I know is that the axe is killer.

Comments

A Universal Controller

[aarmenaa]

So, all the next gen systems are going to have USB ports, right? And the PS2 has them as well. So, why are they making guitars that only work with one system? I would really love to just be able to pick up any two guitars and have a multiplayer game. I play Guitar Hero sometimes with friends, but we only have one controller. The other day I was in Best Buy and they had two controllers hooked up. That's probably the most fun I've had with a video game recently.

How is this a killer to Sony?

[Fallen Kell]

How is this going to kill Sony? The controller is just a controller. Heck if you want some "killer axes" check out these:

Diamond plate/fender style neck/head
Full Size Eternia Strat Body replacement

And that is just a taste of what is out there...

Again how is this going to kill Sony? Sony will have GH2 BEFORE everyone else! If anything that means its a WIN for Sony. It is "nice" that the 360 will get it, but it probably won't happen for at least several months after Sony has had people playing it (you guys do know this comes out in a couple weeks don't you?).

As for the controller, well, all I can say is that it is nothing compaired to ones I have seen out there.

Oh, didn't you guys also know this will be out on the Wii as well? I think they are also looking for a PC version too, but it might not happen because most people would rather play this on a big screen with a decent sound system, and not many people have their PC connected to those things (although I do).

Re:real guitar adapter: Yes to an extent...

[Fallen Kell]

People have already been doing this to an extent. You can't just use the pickups in the real guitar because they output an analog signal. In theory, you "could" put together an external board which you plug the guitar into and have it decide what note you are hitting, but the problem is that in the game, there are only 5 frets. So you need to have 5 "steps" of frequency to figure out what notes you are hitting, but you also need to remember that you can hit multiple frets at the same time, so you would then need to have multiple external highpass/lowpass filters to discretely separate the signal into the 5 frequency bins to coorespond to the 5 different frets on the game controler. Now if you do this, how do you send the fignal for the wammy bar, since all the wammy bar does is lower or raise the frequency of the note? It would be impossible to calculate if the wammy was being used since you are simply dumping the analog out, splitting the different frequency ranges detected and putting digital on/off for each of those frequency ranges. Now this didn't even come close to talking about the harmonic frequencies that will also be generated when strumming a single string on a guitar (you will get multiple harmonics from each string, 1st order, 2nd order and sometimes even 3rd order are easily detectible).

So to make the long story short, no you can't just plug a regular guitar into a box and have it output guitar hero controller data. You CAN however, take a real guitar, pull out the pickups, remove the strings, cuts wholes for the frets in the neck, run a bunch of lines through the neck using the slot for the neck truss bar (or cut your own), put in your own wammy bar, tilt sensor, start/select buttons, and strum bar/mechanism, and wire it to a sony PS2 controller board (make sure you wire properly, the left analog directional key needs to be hard wires in the down position, and the up and down analog directional keys need to be wired to the strum bar's up/down motions, etc., etc.,)

There are lots of people who have taken cheap guitars and did this to them (or broken guitars, or even their normal guitar and swapped out the neck and electronics, this is easy to do on Fender Strats since the neck is bolt on and the electronics are all attached to the pickguard).