My brother and I have been looking for a Guitar Hero replacement until we get around to finally purchasing a controller for our PlayStation 2. I’ve settled with playing Guitar Hero III with my friend Jeremiah every chance I get (we usually get distracted by movies. This week, we’re doing an Alfred Hitchcock marathon).
Until we discovered Frets on Fire. Frets on Fire is open source (ah, music to my ears!) and licensed under GNU GPL.
Pardon my abysmal score on the screenshot. It’s been less than a day since I started playing, and I’m still getting used to the controls. Guitar Hero is much, much easier, because you aren’t confused by extra keys, unlike on FoF, your keyboard is your controller.
The differences:
Interface
Guitar Hero’s interface wins. According to Juice, Frets on Fire’s interface is, simply put, ugly. Let’s just say that FoF’s interface is okay to look at, although you can’t help but compare if you’ve been playing GH for a long time.
No whammy bar
The sound emulator doesn’t have ability to modulate pitch, so no whammy bar here.
More songs
There are a lot of fretting software available so users can fret songs of their choice. There’s also a wide selection of songs available for download - and songs from the Guitar Hero series can also be imported into the game. So this is really an advantage, because the players aren’t limited to the songs that are provided with the game… which, to be frank, really suck.
Overall, it’s a satisfactory Guitar Hero clone. And it’s a little more challenging, because you end up using the keyboard as a controller (unless you’re willing to invest in a guitar controller for your PC). There’s a possibility that you might end up pressing the wrong keys - like I always do. Just a few hours ago, I was wondering why I kept missing notes, when I realized I was pressing the F6 key instead of F5.
Oh, look at these swimsuits
Ooh! I’ve also tried out Google Chrome. I’m not done exploring it yet - so I’ll probably share my thoughts on Google Chrome in the next entry.
My name is Lexie. I'm 19 years old and I'm obsessed with photography and design. I think Vladimir Putin is badass. Guitar Hero, Frets on Fire and noir marathons make me happy. I'm also highly unoriginal.