Well, I give up. I’ve been having a problem with Guitar Hero II ever since I bought it: at multiple points during gameplay, the fret board (i.e., the notes you need to play) and song will freeze up — but not the screen itself, funny enough: the band characters still rock out like they’re playin’ something — and when play resumes, the fret board, and the guitar audio track behind it, will be out-of-sync with the vocal, bass and drums tracks (to ear-curdling effect, as you can imagine).
It seems to be a widely reported problem, and indeed, some persons clearly have it worse than I do: mine usually doesn’t freeze up more than a dozen times per song. Others have suggested that it might be specific shipments (i.e., a bad press or two). I bought the two-disc Guitar Hero & Guitar Hero II package today — I didn’t have the first one, and, frankly, it may have the best track list of the lot — and while Guitar Hero worked perfectly, the new copy of Guitar Hero II has the same problems as the old one (outlined above).
I too tried playing GH2 with all the various permutations of widescreen mode and progressive scan being on and off, to no avail. Oddly enough, when I played Guitar Hero III (for Playstation 2, as all these other titles are, obviously) with both widescreen mode and progressive scan on, it worked like a charm; just the slightest of skips every now and then, and all the tracks were still in sync afterward (which is worst part of the GH2 problem, by far).
What finally led me to giving up on GH2, however, was the discovery that practice mode doesn’t suffer from this problem: basically I just wanna play the songs — Wayward Son is AWESOME! — and now I know I can, so long as I make it through the game once in the skippy-crappy version (to unlock all the tracks for practice). I’m reasonably happy with that; especially since the world seems to have moved on to Guitar Hero World Tour et al.
So I’ll return the two-disc package tomorrow, buy myself a copy of Guitar Hero and cut my losses, as it were. Unless they come out with their own “track packs” of the GH and GH2 tracks for the Wii (the system I started playing GH3 on); then I’ll be dippin’ in my wallet again.
