Some people might call ‘Frets on Fire’ an emulator, others might call brilliant. Whatever it is, its damn good fun.

The game was made for the Assembly party in Finland last year and has instantly developed a large following on the internets. The premise of the game is exactly like Guitar Hero, you have five notes which you must strum to the best of your abilities in time to the music. The best part of it though is the completely insane input system the game has. ‘Unreal Voodoo‘ (the creators of FoF) came up with the excellent idea to use your computer keyboard as a guitar. I’m not sure if they came up with this idea first but it’s definitely innovative. To play the game you flip the keyboard upside down and bash along to the songs using F1 to F5 as the frets and the return key to strum the notes. Sadly there are only three songs included in the install but there are many fan communities out there who make their own home brew packs to play along with, something definitely missing from the official counterpart. My only criticisms with it are the annoying noises made when you miss notes, but thankfully you can turn these off. Also, the keyboard is lacking a tilt sensor and whammy bar which makes it a bit incompetent in comparison to the guitar supplied with Guitar Hero.

Seriously, if your into indie games and don’t mind looking like a bit of an idiot for the sake of good fun - definitely download this game. It’s a proper treat and should run on pretty much all computers and major operating systems. Plus, its open source, so hopefully in a while we’ll start seeing some more clever ideas starting to work there way into it. Much like DDR/Dancing Stage clone ‘Stepmania‘.

Frets on Fire Official Website

[This piece also posted on Rhythm Gamer]

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