Guitar Hero II - Cherry Pie (Hard 100% FC, 174,159 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟)

Been sitting on this for a while (long before I got ahold of the RB4 chart of this song, in fact 😅), and considering it's Pi Day, I figured why not?
Ah, Guitar Hero II. Best 99 cents I've ever spent. A lot of fond memories with this game. It's got an absolutely killer setlist (except "Red Lottery" 👎), awesome presentation with crazy moves from the guitarists and amazing venues (especially Harmonix Arena and Stonehenge), and is just overall a blast to play. It was also a massive improvement over the first Guitar Hero game, with helpful new additions (like Practice Mode and lag calibration for HDTVs) and tweaks to the engine to make it more accessible. This is especially true in regards to HOPOs, which were unreliable in GH1 to the point where strumming everything was more consistent. The Xbox 360 version takes it a step further by not just improving the graphics, but also adding ten additional songs to the 64 from the original PS2 version, plus 24 DLC songs, half of which were songs featured in the original Guitar Hero. (Unfortunately, they got delisted along with all other GH DLC before I could grab any of them. ☹️) While it's pretty dated compared to the later games, I still consider it my favorite in the series, with GH3 just behind it.
I have yet to beat GH2's Career Mode on Expert: the back-to-back solos in "Hangar 18" keep destroying my hands, and I've still got the ten-minute marathon that is "Free Bird" after that. And on Hard, I've still got three songs left to get 5 stars on: "The Trooper," "Psychobilly Freakout," and "Six." Oh, and I've still got only 3 stars on that last song because of how BRUTAL it is.
I considered Guitar Hero II to be my all-time favorite music game... at least until I got ahold of Rock Band 2 a few years later. In fact, it's the reason why I modeled my band's male singer after the one in the Xbox 360 version of GH2. (I got the name Eddie from the Guitar Hero Wiki.) Not sure at the moment if I'll do other songs in this game (especially since I've already got two GH2-to-RB2 conversions recorded at the moment), but we'll see.
If I'm not mistaken, "Cherry Pie" was the very first song I was able to FC in this game on Hard. Pretty simple song, nothing really noteworthy. Just make sure to remember not to whammy before the first activation, or you'll overlap and miss the next SP Phrase.
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"Cherry Pie" - as made famous by Warrant
Hard 100% FC
174,159 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟