Guitar Hero II challenges players to recreate the lead guitar portions of many rock music songs using a specially designed guitar-shaped controller, based on either a Gibson SG for the PlayStation 2 version, a Gibson Explorer for the Xbox 360 version, or else a standard console controller.
Each song can be played at one of four difficulty levels: Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert.
[6] Once a song is unlocked in a tier at any difficulty, it is available for the quick play, competitive, and co-operative modes.
[10] These packs include songs from the original Guitar Hero for the PlayStation 2.
[11] Additional packs consist of songs that have not been featured in Guitar Hero before, and are masters, even though some are indicated as covers in the game.