Do you know that feeling when you meet an old friend? I was fortunate to meet some old friends during the holidays. It may sound akward, but one of my friends came through a Playstation box.

I used to play a lot with my guitar in the past. Somewhere on the way I kinda lost the passion I had, but this Xmas I got some of it back.

I came to visit my parents with my family on Christmas eve. We usually spend our Xmas in 2 parts: first we visit my wife’s parents, then we move our stuff to my parents house. Its a huge operation to move 2 adults plus their 2 little boys and their stuff. We only have like a 10 minute drive between our parents’ houses, but the biggest task is to pack and unpack all the stuff we have with us.

So, after we had unpacked our stuff for the second time in 2 days, I went to see my brother upstairs. I heard he had bought a new game for Playstation, so I went to check it out.

I’m not really into arcade games, so I was positively surprised when my brother introduced his latest game: Guitar Hero II! Needless to say, but I got hooked!

The basics of Guitar Hero II: you have a mini size guitar and you have to pick the correct notes as shown on the screen. There is a wide selection of rock songs you can play and 4 different skill levels where to choose from.

When I first saw the guitar, I was thinking to myself that this is kid’s play. I’ve been playing for so many years, that I will beat the highscores in no time. But I couldn’t been more wrong… My brother, who has never played the guitar, kicked my sorry a** too many times.

There are at least three different elements for succeeding in the game.-You need to use your pinky. This is trivial if you have been playing guitar before, but in this game you have to use more than usual, so it’s good practice. No pain, no gain!

-You need to have stamina. When you are playing song number five of your set, you still need to be concentrated and have enough energy to play the song. And the song after that.

-You need to know when to use your score multipliers. Guitar Hero II is after all a video game, so you need to know the tricks how to multiply your score and when to do it. After you have played a certain number of notes correctly, you can point to the sky with your guitar (yes, you get to do it like the rock stars do). Then you hit a note correctly and you’ll get extra points. Since the extra point mode lasts only for a little while, you should choose a part from the song where you play a lot of notes. The more notes you play, the more points you get. Simple, but not easy.

So if you have bunch of friends coming to your place or you just want to shred with the rock legends, this is definetely a product to consider. Maybe you’ll meet your old friend like I did