Bought one from BestBuy.com and another from their brick-and-mortar store. I just walked in to see if they happened to have a copy and they had several.
ETA: I just checked WalMart.com and found them there.
I have the worst trouble with Star Power, still. How do y’all do it?
I didn’t get it at first, you just gotta kinda play normally with the neck of the guitar pretty horizontal, then just yank it up towards your head for star power. But bf bought an extra off brand guitar for his PS2, and it’s not working so well anymore. You can also press the select button, at least on PS2, but it’s hard to do so.
I bring the neck of the guitar up, while kind of leaning away from it at the same time. Looks goofy, but I can keep playing. My husband hits the plus button (or is it the minus button?) on the guitar.
And let me just say, more than once recently, I’ll pull something off on Hard and not even understand how I did it. It becomes so instinctual that I don’t even recall telling my fingers to move. Seriously, it sounds weird, but I’ll be sure that I didn’t hit the notes, positive that my fingers didn’t move fast enough, but a second later I’ll realize I already did and I’m already onto the next section. It’s the strangest feeling.
I’ll add that if you start with the neck angled already (I know a couple people who play with the guitar already at a pretty sharp diagonal), you have to jerk it even farther. It took us forever to figure out why Star Power wasn’t working…it’s because you have to move the guitar a certain distance, not just vertical (although it you start near-horizontal, then going vertical is just fine).
I tilt my whole body so that my wrist angle doesn’t change. I also do it fairly slowly. You can try hitting the select (?) button with the heel of your right hand. It’s right next to the whammy bar.
I did this a couple times the first day I got GH II to beat some of the easier expert level songs (while I do play some guitar, I’m a keyboardist by training), but I’ve since found that it’s actually much easier for me to play by holding the guitar normally.
That’s the technique I use with my ps2; the button might be called something different on the wii. Like the OP, I have fairly small hands, but I can easily strum and fire off my star power without skipping a beat if I do it this way.
OP: Thanks for asking this- I was so frustrated I went back to medium and stayed there- but now I can’t wait to go home and try some of these suggestions!
[aside] It would seem to me that they should have started you out on ‘Easy’ using all of the buttons, at a slower speed, rather than forcing your brain to re-learn finger movements every single level.
When moving your hand, keep your fingers in the same place and move your entire forearm. A lot of people at first try shifting positions by sort of moving all their fingers, and inevitably wind up with their fingers all out of position. Keep your fingers locked in the same relative position, and move your entire hand. Watch someone really good at their game, and the motion looks almost mechanical - your hand snaps back and forth between the first and second position, but the fingers don’t really move. Watch a real guitarist or violin player move up and down the fingerboard/fretboard, and you’ll see what I mean.
Occasionally, you should just stretch your pinky to hit the fifth button, so you need to learn both techniques. But the biggest problem I see with people first learning to change hand position is that their fingers fly all over the place and then try to land on the right buttons again.
If you play enough, you’ll eventually get to the point where you don’t even think about your fingers any more - you’ll see the notes and just play them, just as real musicians do. Your fingers will just go where they need to go. Then your limitations will be become more technical - speed, accuracy, timing, etc. Finger positioning will be automatic.
Wow, Sam, thanks for the great tip! I’m going to try that as soon as I have an opportunity to play.
My guess is, based on my limited experience with both real guitars and the game itself (just got it Sunday), they’re emulating a common learning technique with real guitars. You don’t start out, IME, moving your hand very much with a real guitar, either.
[aside]Having just picked up the game this week, I’m disappointed that Slayer was the first and only song since actually playing my very first song (and not understanding how the buttons actually worked) that I’ve failed. Hell, I’ve even managed to pass TTFAF on easy (barely, and the next time I played it I failed, but still). grumble
Well, it’s called easy for a reason. I can get 100% on TTFAF on easy without pretty much any effort, but I can only 3 star it on medium, I can get 3% of the way through it on hard. Not all the songs scale that steep with difficulty though.
My point was actually that Slayer’s the only song to give me major problems so far. And keep in mind I’ve been playing the game for all of 3 days now (I played through the tutorials and only 2 songs on Sunday), so I’d say I’m doing well.
Right, and my point is that the easy difficulty is more like an extended tutorial. It doesn’t generally give problems, at least I don’t think it’s reasonable to be disappointed that the easy difficulty is too easy.
With good reason: The initial release of the game for Wii was mistakenly made in mono only. Apparently a new, stereo version will be coming soon. I’d strongly recommend waiting for it.
I started on easy, because I had never played GH first, and after a bit I got the hang of it and whizzed through the career mode. I had told myself I needed to do one song at 100% before I went to medium, but no matter what I always mised 1-3 notes. EVERY TIME. Frustrating as hell. One time I was well on my way near the very end of Welcome to the Jungle when my Wii remote lost it’s connection due to dying batteries. By the time I resumed I obviously missed some notes.
Anyway, yesterday I got my first five star reviews in Medium, but I still haven’t been able to do hammer ons and hammer offs.
There really aren’t enough HOPO items in Medium for the neccesary practice - if there are any at all - some songs clearly have them, but most do not.
“My Name Is Jonas” is probably the best one to practice HOPOs. That’s also the only song I’ve 5-starred on Medium, because I was determined to figure out how to do it and practiced those sections incessantly.
yeah - and that’s one of the example songs I would say that “HOPO’s aren’t needed” - you’re right they are there -
For me, “cliffs of Dover” in hard has the right concept of HOPOs. (as well as ‘la grange’ and ‘pride and joy’)
Sometimes I think they do HOPOs just to do them -