Guitar Hero : Greatest Hits

Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits for PlayStation 2 is the European and Australian title for the 2009 music-rhythm compilation released in North America as Guitar Hero: Smash Hits. Developed by Beenox and published by Activision, this PS2 entry revisits songs from the early, guitar-centered years of the Guitar Hero series while rebuilding them around the full-band format introduced by Guitar Hero World Tour. It arrived in June 2009 and brings together 48 licensed recordings drawn from Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s, Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock, and Guitar Hero: Aerosmith.

The central idea is familiar but broader than the original appearances of these songs. Players follow scrolling note charts and match colored fret prompts with a guitar controller, strum in time, and use Star Power to improve their score. Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits also assigns compatible parts for bass, drums, and vocals, so a group can tackle a song as a band instead of treating it only as a lead-guitar performance. Difficulty choices accommodate players at different levels, while drum charts include the Expert+ option for a two-pedal setup. Some guitar passages also use slider-note sections, a mechanic carried forward from the World Tour-era games.

Its song list is a retrospective rather than a collection of newly written material. Tracks such as Queen’s “Killer Queen,” Joan Jett and the Blackhearts’ “I Love Rock ’n Roll,” Alice in Chains’ “Them Bones,” The Police’s “Message in a Bottle,” Heart’s “Barracuda,” and DragonForce’s “Through the Fire and Flames” return with master recordings and new instrument charts. Beenox did not simply copy the older guitar charts: it reworked arrangements to make room for a complete group. That can mean a part that was absent from an earlier guitar-only version now has vocals or drums, while the different instruments give a familiar song new jobs to perform.

Career mode frames the performances as a tour through fantasy venues inspired by well-known locations around the world. A band earns stars to unlock its next step, chooses performers, and can customize its look with items earned through progress. Separate career paths let individual players or a band work through the music, and Quickplay makes the complete on-disc setlist available without waiting for career unlocks. The game also includes the competitive Battle of the Bands mode, in which two complete bands can face one another, alongside the Rock Star Creator and Music Studio tools associated with the World Tour framework. User-made songs could be shared through the GHTunes service of its original release period.

On PlayStation 2, Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits remains the same Beenox-developed, Activision-published compilation released for PlayStation 3, Wii, and Xbox 360, rather than a port of one of the older PS2-only Guitar Hero games. The PS2 version uses an 8 MB PlayStation 2 memory card to retain progress and settings, and its manual notes that the game does not support a PlayStation 2 multitap. Its regional name is the main naming difference to remember when searching for it: European and Australian packaging says Guitar Hero: Greatest Hits, whereas the same 2009 release is known as Guitar Hero: Smash Hits in North America. For series players, it offers a single disc built around re-charted favorites and a chance to play music from the franchise’s first five published games with the expanded guitar, bass, drum, and vocal setup.