The second Guitar Hero related story in as many days! Shocking!

What prompted me to start writing about my exploits in Linux this summer, beyond the fact that summer is almost over, is a discovery I made while exploring Linux gaming. One of the biggest impedance to Linux to a very active gamer as myself is the gaming aspect. Everyone knows that most commercial games are released Windows-only, and have been for years. So during my summer Linux trials, I have frequently been looking to see all that Linux has to offer to my gaming habits.

Today that search led me to Frets on Fire. While perusing several lists of games, I read one that described this as a guitar playing simulation, and that instantly rang the bells in my head that said: Guitar Hero clone. I’ve been looking for a good PC Guitar hero clone, and the only thing I had previously found was Freetar Hero. I had been following the progress of Freetar Hero for awhile, and while it is coming along nicely, the only thing released is a limited song editor. No flashy game, and not much to it.

Today, I stumble across a full game including editor, that runs in both Windows in Linux, and does not need the Guitar Hero controller. Since I was already booted into Ubuntu, I installed it first in Linux. First off, the tutorial voiceover is beyond annoying, but it shows off the game well. Even tells you to hold you keyboard like a guitar and use the F-keys as strings and the enter key as the pick. Cheesy, but it works. It was made more bulky by my Logitech G15, but I could always plug in my old keyboard to a USB port when I want to give it a whirl.

The songs are not any you would recognize, as they seem made just for the game, but they are reasonably fun to play. Each has three difficulty settings. The scrolling song action is very well done, already polished and only lacking in background visuals. You have multiple note scoring, and bright visual indicators of hits and misses. The sounds go all screwy when you miss notes, and they play satisfyingly loud when you nail it. The only things missing from the full Guitar Hero experience are the whammy bar and the tilting action, which I’m not sure can ever be duplicated with a keyboard.

I haven’t goofed around with the song editor enough to give it a good review, but it seemed complete and solid. I’ll have to give it a run with an actual song. And that brings us to a problem, the community for this game is very small, and there are a very sparse amount of songs converted to the game. I’m not sure if the song editor is at fault, the game is too new, or the community is not large enough, but there are less than a dozen songs I found on the message boards. Freetar Hero boasts many dozens, possibly hundreds, even with just an editor released.

I hope many others try out Frets on Fire, looking beyond the cheesy tutorial, and start popping out some songs! I don’t have a PS2, damnit!

update 1: Turns out there are plenty of songs if you register on the Frets on Fire forums. Still not as prolific a community as Freetar Hero, but all they have is an editor, so they may devote more time to cranking out songs. Also, almost all the FoF community songs are on “amazing” difficulty, and most are very tough.