If I tell you that this game, I admit it, often manages to keep me interested, keep me clustered to the screen until late at night just to be able to unlock that one achievement and and makes that despite tears coming from my eyes and cramped fingers I keep playing, you know what's good!

Who doesn't know what the game is all about should just sift through our PS2 review. The lyrical praise of the game is something you get along for free. In this review we'll mainly focus on where progress has been made and why this version is the best. Although in the end we're talking about a port, there's plenty of new to gather, even for those that already bought the other versions.

The first thing that gets noticed is the guitar itself. This time you get a replica of the Gibson X-plorer which is a lot more solid than its predecessor, received better placement of the buttons, is more quiet to strumm and has as only downpoint a Select-button which could have been placed better. Next to the songs we already know (think Rolling Stones, Nirvana and Rage of the Machine) on Xbox you'll get ten extra going from Iron Maiden and Pearl Jam to over here lesser known stuff like Rock & Roll Hoochie Coochie. Together with the unlockable ones you get an impressive amount of 74 sings. You can debate for hours about the selection and also I have my opinion, but let's just say that you get a selection of both top singles as well as some strange choices.

Together with the handful of new tracks the makers also improved the career mode by streamlining the difficulty degree of the songs and offering some of them earlier or later in the game. It seems like a minor adjustment but it plays a lot smoother and will make you go through the learning curve a lot better than in the PS2 version.

Also new and "exclusive" for the Xbox360 are the leaderboards and downloadable content. The first are fantastic but you do remain with a feeling that there are a lot more possibilities to play this game online. You can compare "all-time" and weekly high scores but it would be even more fun to do this depending on the mode to see how many notes per song you had correct, which sections, etc. These are of course just details since it's already cool to be able to laugh at your friends with their pathetic and your interstellar score on "Free Bird", "Mother" or "Psychobilly Freakout".

Less well done for now are the downloadable extras. Additional tracks are quite pricy and need to be taken in packs of three so that you can't perfectly choose those you want most. Hopefully Activision will learn from the first reactions on this approach and make that we'll soon be able to download every song seperately.

The graphics also went through an overhaul but this is clearly the improvement with the least impact on the game. The sharper, colorful and HD visuals are fun to watch but you don't have to buy the game for this. More addictive are the achievements that are really well done with a couple of very easy ones that are quite funny like refusing and "encore" or the failing of an "easy" song, while there are also some that will demand the most of you. There are also a couple specifically aimed at the multiplayer mode and this was extended on Xbox360.

If you want to play with friends you can do this against each other as well as together. Competitively you can play a piece part by part, or just rock the same number together. Interesting for sure is the co-op mode where you can choose to play the normal guitar or do the bass guitar. That way you play a different instrument in the same song which is a very attractive idea, especially because the bass guitar offers a new challenge for the experienced players. This is of course dependent on the song because in certain tracks this is limited to very repetitive patterns.

Unfortunately, playing together with your mates is less cool than I had hoped. You share the same Rock meter, streaks and you'll need to lift your guitars together at the same time to activate Starpower, but in the end you're focusing on what's happening on the screen. You'll never really get that group feeling, partially because the bassline is often hard to hear and you won't really get the result you expect. And why is there no multiplayer through Xbox Live?