Hi, I’m starting a new series here, TGIF Game of the Week, that highlights a good Free and Open Source game each Friday. If you know any good games, please feel free to write an article on it too, or start your own series. Partial FOSS games are fine (e.g. game engine is FOSS, game files/graphics are properitary), as long as it is noted. Register for a new account if you do not have one for the website. Also, this article does not reflect the views of UALUG, etc.
What would make you look more like a douche than playing air guitar? When you do it with a keyboard. And yet, Frets on Fire, a musical game that simulates playing the guitar similar to Guitar Hero, is immensely fun and satisfying. The sarcastic voice of a hipster dude named Jurgen introduces you to the game basics in the tutorial level (“Ah OK… You suck.“) You can then start playing one of the five included songs on varying difficulty settings. You can also create game files with songs of your choice, or import one of the tens of thousands of game files created by others.
It took a bit of getting used to the controls for me – holding the keyboard in a certain way – a wireless keyboard works best. Apparently The onscreen display prompts you to press keys keeping in rhythm with the music. Once I got the hang of it, it’s actually quite fun. The feeling of actually playing the song is awesome – as long as you don’t screw up.The built in songs are rather easy, but download, say, Dragonforce’s Through the Fire and Flames, and your whole weekend will be wasted on trying to play in sync with the seemingly never-ending onslaught of keys. I did. And I still couldn’t keep up. :/
Frets on Fire is written in Python and released in GPL, included songs and some internal fonts have proprietary license. Check it out and download on its website – it’s available for Windows, Mac OS X, and various Linux distributions.