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So, Last weekend at the Sandbox Symposium, I had the good fortune to find myself running a Guitar Hero 2 Co-op Mode Tournament with Elena Seigman of Harmonix, Lead Designer on Karaoke Revolution Party, and Producer on Guitar Hero 2.  While the E3 build she brought offered little new information about the hotly anticipated sequel, I did get to hear lots of cool little tidbits about the game and life at Harmonix.

Guitar Hero 2 is scheduled to hit the shelves in time for Black Friday, and while they're not in crunch yet, they've done a lot of work in making substantial refinements to the gameplay and the visuals.  Of course, we'll get all new songs, venues, character models and mocap for returning characters (including a much improved ripper), and at least two new characters.  First is Dax DeVille, the Rockabilly Guy seen in the E3 demo, where he was named 'King Kendall', after Harmonix Artist Jason Kendall, who also did the awesome tutorial voice-overs in Guitar Hero, and is the singer of Harmonix House Band Monkey Steals the Peach.  Elena also has a girl rock trio of Harmonix staff who hope to get a bonus song in Guitar Hero 2; however, the name of their band is 'Vagiant', which complicates things just a little.  Harmonix Management even built a practice room in the basement of their Boston office in order to encourage this type of extracirricular behavior.

Elena didn't tell me the name of another new character, a Norwegian Death Rocker, who, as she mentioned (with an Achewood-class level of detail), hates big dogs.  It's very clear that Harmonix takes these characters very seriously; their personalities are as lovingly rendered as the Guitar Hero venues, and I'm sure they have larger lives in the hive mind at Harmonix that we can only glimpse.

One of the most obvious enchancements is a new venue lighting system that allow the audio guys who lay out the gems to send commands to the lighting system to matchup with big changes in the music, just like a real rock show.  The lighting is really improved, and and behaves just how you'd expect to see the lights run at a rock show, except for one thing: some of the 'audio guys' have real rock show experience, and set the lights to blackout during breaks in the music.  However, this doesn't work in Guitar Hero, when the only time that the player looks at the world is during breaks in the music.  They came up with an elegant solution that preserves the blackout feeling without reducing the view.

The art continues to stand out in Guitar Hero 2; all the menu screens are again fantastic, especially the coop level select screen, which features a 2-headed, 3-legged, 2-axed mutant rocker.  One interesting fact is that the saving screen from GH1, with the man holding his ears, was done by Shepard Fairey, creator of the Andre the Giant has a Posse sticker, and spawner of the subsequent meme.  Most of the posters were done by Rock Poster artists from outside Harmonix, and they've really delivered the same high-quality fit and finish that Guitar Hero displays.  Also, the success of Guitar Hero has led to demand for in-game endorsements, and while the band will now feature Orange amplifiers (and a sponsored drum kit too), Harmonix takes this super-seriously and will only put the right stuff in the game.  One of the venues is the Vans Warped Tour, and the stage is a medieval dungeon, with awesome success effects.  

Co-op mode is truly fantastic, especially since each player can choose their own difficulty.  I'm forseeing playing a lot of that with Nemo.  We'll also get an improved multiplayer mode, Pro Faceoff mode where each player plays exactly the same notes, and a practice mode with speed adjustable by section.  It sounds like there will be several more original masters in addition to Primus' John the Fisherman, which had to be completely remastered for use in the game (recording technology has changed a lot since 1989).  Core gameplay remains mostly unchanged, although Hammer-ons and Pull-offs will be tweaked without the need to hold down the lower frets, and the window of success for hammer-ons is moving back a bit.  While three-note chords have been added, it sounds like they've decided to eliminate chords that bridge from fret 1-5.  Even though people love these because they feel so, well, so guitarry, Harmonix feels strongly that even people with small hands should be able to finish the expert mode.  That's a good point, but maybe we could get a small hand switch option… I'd hate to lose that particular challenge!

Elena confirmed that the window for hitting a note successfully in the same at all difficulties (although they've argued about that) and that wiggling the whammy bar as fast as possible when applicable is the path to maximum star power (although they've argued about that).  She also said that Star Power was originally intended to be turned on by raising the neck, and turned off by lowering it, but the tilt switches were just not reliable enough for it to work that way.  It would be awesome to have pressure sensitivity in the controller, but she thought it unlikely due to cost issues (I'd rather have a foot pedal to stomp on).  She also said that Harmonix would love to do a sequel to Amplitude, but it's become a lot harder to sell a music game without a peripheral.  And while there is a loading card in the GH2 Demo that promises Accordion Hero in Summer 2008, it remains just a joke and frequent focus of my own feverish dreams.

For the tournament, we let teams qualify at the difficulty level of their choice throughout the day, and then brought back the top 8 teams to play the song of their choice on hard difficulty for the highest score.  Because scores are not normalized from song to song, the advantage laid with the longer songs, so we heard War Pigs over and over again.  However, a team from UNC-Charlotte took the top prize.  It was really great to get to play Guitar Hero 2 so much (YYZ is HARD!  What's next, King Crimson?), and it was fantastic to get to talk to Elena and Tracy Rosenthal-Newsom.  It's clear that Guitar Hero 2 is being crafted with as much love and serious thought as the original, and that Harmonix is about to put another Smash Hit into Red Octane's (and now, Activision's) hands.

John Scalzo reports on the first year of his circulating game collection at Mysterious Public Library (MPL). That post went all the way to the top last week, and I’m hopeful that this growing awareness that games belong in the library will start to drive more demand and less funny looks.

Interestingly, his hottest title was Harry Potter 2. I wonder if this is just because there are more Potter fans in the library (duh), or if it also caught the eye during searches for the books, especially since the titles probably didn’t spend much time on the shelf. Katamari Damacy also makes the top 10. I really wanted to use Katamari multiplayer as a surprise round game last season. Maybe someday…

Kotaku’s post back at Scalzo’s 6-month mark said he had sold the MPL administration on supporting the ps3 at launch, although his first year wrapup sounds less convinced about it. It really depends on the intersection between library patrons and early adopters. I think that a lot of the people in my town who are likely to shell out $500 on launch day probably have no clue what the library is doing. We’ve got to change that.