Guitar Hero in 4K - 'I Love Rock & Roll' Expert 100% FC [PCSX2]

I Love Rock and Roll - Joan Jett & The Blackhearts

Here's the start of a little pet project that I've been wanting to do for a long time now. This all stemmed from the fact that I am not satisfied with the quality of my original GH1 and GH80's videos. I recorded them over 3 years ago using a composite-to-HDMI converter, and the quality is not great. There are other converters available that will get better video quality out of a PS2, but you can only go so far. Using an emulator really opens up the possibilities of improved visual quality because you can bump up the internal resolution far beyond 480p.

Granted, the emulation of this game is not perfect. There's a portion of the score and multiplier that are missing. A lot of animations do not work properly. There's times where there's seemingly a blur filter applied over the background that looks pretty bad. There are occasional frame drops unrelated to my hardware, but seemingly an issue with PCSX2 itself. I wrote a small disclaimer that you will see at the bottom of every description to hopefully answer some questions people will inevitably have about a graphical glitch they saw.

In this playthrough I will not be caring about getting a high score. I loosely followed the star power paths for every song, but did not try hard at squeezing or anything. Also, I did not waste too much time going for FCs. Every video will be an FC of the song, but a handful of the harder songs will be FC'd using save states. Save states allow me to save my place in the song and restart at that point if I miss a note. For example, I can play bark at the moon up until the hard part of the solo, save my progress, then be able to restart the song right before the hard part of the solo instead of having to restart the entire song. I already proved I can FC these songs and get decent scores, I don't feel the need to do it again.

One more quick thing, I think I'll be keeping most descriptions brief unless there's something really noteworthy to be talked about. I'm getting lazy in my post-dual-FSFC retirement phase ;)

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Note:
This was played at 3840x2160 on PCSX2, a PS2 emulator, not original hardware. Because of this, various graphical glitches can occur, such as broken animations, lighting glitches, and more. The purpose of this video is to showcase this game running at the highest quality possible, not to showcase skill or score.

PCSX2 Settings:

PC Specs:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X
NVIDIA RTX 3080 Founder's Edition
32GB Ram

[TnZay]

And here is the song that opened up this amazing franchise. Nice to see GH1 vids in 4k

[kingcactus]

0:02 can we just acknowledge the rock meter here

[RadianceMarluxia]

0:42 4K Judy Nails winking at the audience looks like my sleep paralysis demon winking at me.

Jokes aside, this is a great project. Pretty much every song in GH1 is a banger so I'm sure this is going to be a nice little new adventure :)

[TheBassSinger]

This is what I'd like to imagine a GH1 remaster would look like. Nice to see the highway not stretched out and blurry.

[Joao-sivr]

it's so nice to know there are still people out there who love & play guitar hero. Great channel btw!

[beansmccheese]

The rock meter from the side is so cursed

[BenAck]

I can't help but think this is what GH1 would look like remastered. Who else wants to see Guitar Hero get remastered? I know Clone Hero is a thing, but it's just not the same in my honest opinion.

[TRPLE_]

I finally FC'd Bark at the Moon just last week. Yeah it was in CH but I'm happy to have finally got it after nearly 16 years!
Also, gotta love that YouTube detects music as Joan Jett even though it's a cover, lol.

[tysoon]

at least we still had GH fans and I feel like the game didn't die tbh

[naswii]

Looks like the score meter took the day off lol

[michaelhebert]

Love that "off screen" rock meter

[jadenbogart]

Guitar Hero: Smash Hits and Rock Band 3 also have this famous song involved in them, yo

[sterlingnimbus]

OMG!!! 4K You're so incredible!!!! :)

[TheTanman]

the lightning bolts from SP gain and activating looks so clean compared to PS2 native quality.

[lostchris]

Just wanted to say that I still care for Guitar Hero overall. It's been a fun journey of 20 years :)

[theguitarheronerd]

Oh nice, i've always kinda wanted to do something like this like uploading HD versions of some of the PS2 games.

Nicely done.

Also thanks for the settings as well, i never could get mine perfect.

[fabriziomartins]

Woah I’ve never seen gh1 this good before.

[trooperV]

shit i remember playing this on a crt tv back then and thinking it couldn’t get any better!

[tonyboyswag]

Also am I high at a Joan Jett concert right now the background is making me feel cross-eyed

[Mickelraven]

Wow! I've always wanted to see what Guitar Hero 1 looks like in Widescreen! :D