Birthday came and passed (phew!.) I took the day off and did some sleeping (finally) and then some thinking. Among my (new-)year’s resolutions, I realized that it has been quite a while since I did anything artistic. Up until half a year ago, I’ve been composing crappy riffs, doing lots of photography, game hacking, technology hacking, rewriting favorite games, writing articles, elaborating my musical knowledge, photoshopping and just coding for fun.
So, I started hacking Guitar Hero again. A few months ago I tried to write a studio toolkit, to allow people to write their own songs (and mainly to have Guitar Hero – Complete Therapy? Version.) It has been long since then, but I remember I stopped at some point because the titles for the album were compressed/encrypted.
Yesterday, while killing time on google, I stumbled upon a powerpoint presentation from Harmonix. They mentioned a feature that they removed. Let me freshen your memory: at the very end of 2006, Harmonix released a demo version of GH2. A few hackers played with it a bit and found that it was just a crippled version of the full game. They released 3 modified isos, each featured different unlocked songs from the upcoming full release. That kinda got me thinking.. If they did it once (twice actually, they also forgot the xbox images in the ps2 release..) then they might do it again.
Today I was toying around with copying sectors here and there, trying to get the game to run some unused files. I must say I haven’t made much progress, but I did get to play Bark at the Moon again..
Expect some GH hacks next week! 
