Guitar Hero - Smash Hits

The pitch was unusually literal: take the songs that made the series, and record them properly. Much of the early Guitar Hero catalogue existed only as cover versions, licensed cheaply and performed by session musicians, and those tracks had only ever been charted for a single plastic guitar. Beenox's job here was to go back, secure the master recordings, and rewrite the whole set for drums, bass and vocals as well. It is a remaster in the truest sense, and also a tacit admission that the series had outgrown its own foundations.

What you get is forty-eight tracks pulled from the first three games and the Rocks the 80s expansion, from the obvious anthems down to the boss fights. Hearing the real version of a song you spent hours learning in cover form is genuinely strange at first; timings shift slightly, solos breathe differently, and a chart you thought you had memorised no longer sits where your hands expect. The note tracks were reauthored rather than ported, so muscle memory is only half useful.

On PlayStation 2 the package arrives stripped down. No online play, reduced visual flourish, venues and characters carried over from the World Tour engine rather than built fresh. That was standard practice by 2009 — Activision kept shipping PS2 versions because the install base was still enormous and the guitars were already in people's cupboards — but the compromise is visible the moment you look past the note highway. The band mode works, the four-part play is real, and none of it looks like anything more than a courtesy port.

Where it holds up is exactly where it should. The setlist is front-loaded with the songs that convinced people this genre was worth owning hardware for, and the difficulty curve remains punishing in the old, unfashionable way. Expert charts here assume you learned to play on games that did not care whether you were having fun. The band additions are competent rather than inspired; drum charts in particular feel transcribed more than designed, workmanlike where Harmonix's work of the same period had swing.

By the time it shipped, the plastic instrument boom was already turning, and a greatest-hits collection was a fairly clear signal that the well was running low. Taken on its own terms it is still the most efficient way to own the series' best guitar work in one place. A retrospective released while the thing it commemorates was still on shelves — which tells you something about how fast that whole moment burned.