With the announcements of new Rock Band and Guitar Hero games, my vigor towards those titles currently in my collection was reignited. Coincidentally, it wasn’t too long before these announcements that I had procured a copy of Green Day: Rock Band. It had been sitting in my closet for a while and with this redeveloped enthusiasm, my partner and I got the plastic instrument band back together. To be fair, achievements did play a role too.

We jammed through Green Day: Rock Band in a single sitting – complying with the requirements for one of the game’s endurance based achievements. It didn’t make him a fan of theirs and didn’t make me anything more than the casual fan I already was. We conquered, and moved onto Guitar Hero: Van Halen a week or so later. We aimed to do the same with it, but called it quits early on when we realized the achievements wouldn’t pop for the both of us, only the primary player. For us, this was a nightmarish callback to the launch of Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock.

I purchased that game on a break between college classes and when school was done for the day, we rocked the evening away in a single marathon session. When all was said and done, I had the medium co-op achievement pop, but nothing happened for him. After the fact research yielded our answer: nothing would unlock for the secondary player. What a jip! What were people supposed to do to unlock the four co-op related achievements? Bribe friends, put out an ad on Craigslist? Keeping in mind that the difficulty achievements didn’t stack meant all related songs would have to be played through four times, each on a different difficulty. Needless to say we didn’t start a new co-op career on another difficulty.

So, I was left to finish Guitar Hero: Van Halen on my own. Unlike the crotches of 80s rock stars, it wasn’t bulging with content so it was a relatively brief affair. I did discover a few of their lesser-known songs though. All this recent Guitar Hero and Rock Band playing had me curious towards the older games in my collection, specifically, ones with achievements that I hadn’t obtained. Perusing TrueAchievements signaled that I may be able to clean up a few achievements in Guitar Hero II – namely completing the game on expert and a co-op achievement or two. This was a possibility because the co-op achievements unlocked for both players.

So I fired up Guitar Hero II and was greeted with a nearly complete expert playthrough – I was four songs away. Of those, I only had access to three. The first one I attempted was “Misirlou” by Dick Dale. Although you may not recognize it by title or performer, if you hear it, you’d likely be able to place it – surf rock of the 1960s. Surprising myself I passed it with flying colors barely scraping by on my first time. “Wow! I can do this” I exclaimed to nobody but myself. My next attempts – “Institutionalized” by Suicidal Tendencies and “Hangar 18” by Megadeth put the difficulty level into perspective.

I didn’t give up though. On my initial attempts with those songs I was able to clear more than 80 percent on each. A few days passed before my next attempts but with those I played the songs over and over and over again, getting better at performing the tricky hammer-ons and pull-offs and learning the crucial moments to activate Star Power. One by one I conquered the songs until I was left with game-ender: “Free Bird” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. I sat through the first few minutes of that song no less than a half-dozen times thanks to the tricky solos. Eventually, everything synced and I was able to scrape by. Achievement unlocked.