Guitar Hero and Guitar Hero II. You've probably heard these games being talked about a lot in the past few weeks (especially right after the holidays). Well, you might have missed out if you didn't have a ps2 (or xbox as that version is coming out soon). However, there is hope.

Frets on Fire is an free, open source, multi-platform, mod-friendly, expansionable, community driven, amazing piece of software. It has the same basic premise as guitar hero, with notes flying down the screen and requiring the user to press the keys in time. The music plays the guitar parts when you hit the notes correctly, and makes mess up sounds when you don't. This part of the game is exactly like Guitar Hero. The one thing it lacks is commercial support so by default all you have is three songs to play from (this also means that it uses ogg vorbis format). This is not a problem as you can make tablature from music you have, or you can find submissions of tablature that people have made online, or you can import songs from Guitar Hero I/II as it's compatible.

There is no level structure at this point, instead there's a scoring system. The real reward is the audio quality that you get after playing the music. The feeling that you get after knowing that you made your computer play that lick is sweet.

Also, there are a lot of mods out and in the works. The regular game is still being developed heavily (last release was a week or two ago). This core is working towards multiplayer over the internet; however, there are mods out there that will probably achieve this first.

Overall, the game is very impressive. Although it does not match the awesomeness of Guitar Hero, it comes very close and it's free! Plus you will never believe how well the F1-5 keys on your keyboard work as frets and how the enter or shift key is a good pick. If you have a wireless keyboard like myself, it's all the better.

I have only played the linux version, but the windows version is supposed to be just as good. There's a mac version that's still in testing, and there's even a bsd version. So unless you are running some version of OS/2, solaris, or TI-OS, you have no reason not to get this (let's not start in on all the OSs I missed).

As Jorgen Von HavensswafchinMurgen says, I am you're god. You will need to use the escape key when you realize...that you SUCK.

Edit: I tried to put this on the computers at school that I have put Ubuntu on, but I'm having problems that I believe stem from the lack of a graphics driver I have on this computer. I looked into getting a graphics driver, but I've been unable to compile it. The graphics card is a crappy intel integrated 82945G graphics card. I found this and I cvs the opengl package, but I couldn't find where it saved it and was unable to compile it. I know that Frets on Fire requires opengl graphics card. Any ideas?

Oh, sweet. I don't have an xbox 360, but I do have a wireless keyboard.. and I can borrow the game to rip the music off it.

That's sweet, although I've heard that the ripping process can take 8 hours to complete, but they're working on that.

Sweetness! All the more reason for me to get a ps2 -> usb adapter. Now I need it for DDR and Guitar Hero.

EDIT: I'll give a second review in about 2 hours

EDIT2: I just checked the clock. I guess I'll play tomorrow morning.

EDIT3: Gah, nevermind... My sister got a phone call and my download got corrupted. And she's getting another call later tonight, so I can't leave it on overnight. Maybe tomorrow night...

Wow, that's fun. I'm having trouble with actually getting it to recognize the notes, I don't know if it's my keyboard or what, but I know I can do better than I'm doing. (I'm pretty respectable at the real thing). Now to see if I can get a PS2 guitar for a reasonable price..

I'm downloading it right now. It should be done before schools out. No one else uses this computer (this is the last comp sci class of the day).

I'm still only getting 10-15kp/s, though... But it is an improvement from my 3-5 at home

Cool! Post your thoughts after you play it.

Okay, I just played 5 or 6 songs. Well, 3 songs, but a total of 5 or 6 games.

First, let me describe my rig:
2.7ghz celron
512mb ram
64mb onboard intel extreme graphics
Windows XP home

The game lagged too much for me to get a good score. I only got a max of about 70% notes hit on easy. In fast paced parts of the songs, I got video lag (not audio, though...) so I had to guess when to pick for about 1 - 1.5 seconds at a time. I get about the same amount of lag in single player Halo. That's saying something for a game with crap graphics...

Which is my second point. The graphics were lame. A picture of fire in the background and keyboard keys as frets. Graphics aren't really a factor in a game of this genre, though, and since it's open source, that's not really that bad.

Only 3 starting songs. You can download more and make your own, though, so again, it isn't that bad. Unless you have dial-up... There are places to just download the frets (about 4kb), so if you find frets for a song you already have, you're fine. Oh, but the song has to be .ogg. I've heard of this format, but don't know how to convert songs to it. I'll Google it later.

With my wireless keyboard, it feels a lot like playing guitar hero. I wrapped my left hand under the keyboard and came back up around to hit the f keys. The only problem with the controls is the lack of a whammy bar. That was by far the most fun part of guitar hero.

Basically, the game is all right. With multi player support and maybe the arrow keys for a whammy bar, it could be really fun. In its current state, though, I don't really think it's that great.

EDIT: Ah, good, audacity can convert songs.

Go into the settings and make the anti-aliasing lower quality, lower your resolution, and up your FPS! You said it yourself, graphics don't matter. For the record, I was able to get this game to work on terrible integrated intel graphics cards at school at bearable framerates and I think that they are a bit worse than yours although they are in the same league.

Ogg format is THE standard in linux. I thought you were running DSL for a while. Anyways, as you've discovered, Audacity can convert to it. You just have to make sure you put the guitar tracks into a file called guitar.ogg and the rest of the song into song.ogg (if you only have a mixed version you can easily put the highs and lows in separate .ogg files).

True the game is not near guitar hero standards, but it's open source and developing. I think in a couple of months it could really be something!

Not necessarily, why would you think that? They just don't use MP3s due to licensing issues, and obviously WMAs can't be used because them only work on 32-bit X86 platforms, and require the windows DLLs. I personally prefer the loss-less FLAC to the lossy OGG...

I had no trouble getting a decent framerate on the family computer, which has nasty SiS integrated graphics, but some of the stuff looked really nasty, and other stuff didn't show up at all, probably due to the hardware.

I tried the lowest res, but it still lagged. I didn't/don't know what anti-aliasing is, so I'll try that when I get home.


I have a comp with DSL, but I can't install programs on it. Oh, and it won't meet the sys reqs. The game requires 256mb of RAM, and that comp only has 96. (Well, currently 32, but just until my sister goes back to school and I can steal my RAM back)

Oh, and I play all of my music on DSL as mp3s. Xmms handles them fine.



I agree completely. As long as they add a whammy bar!


P.S. Make sure you do the tutorial. It is hilarious!

I've got a copy the the 'real' game for tonight, and I'm ripping stuff as I type this. Taking forever, though. It's been going for twenty minutes, and it's about .2% done.
21:46 CST update: mostly done with number 11 of 48, after 4h47m

I didn't say they can't play them, I said they don't use the format due to licensing issues. MP3 is NOT an open or free format as people seem to think

And seriously man, drop the ancient XMMS, its not even that good

Meh, it's lightweight, handles all the music files I need, and shuffles every song on my hd just fine. No point wasting time trying to download something better for a comp I won't be using much longer.

That is true. Unlike for us, Foamy would have to actually wait for a music player to download...for days...

Try audacious - http://audacious-media-player.org/Main_Page

Same idea/concept as XMMS, but its actually updated and has a nicer, smoother GUI (in my opinion)

In an attempt to get us back on topic, I've discovered a large supply of extra tracks for frets on fire (including imports from both Guitar Hero's as well as other songs) hidden in slimy torrents of the underworld. While I don't approve of copyright infringement, I'll have no problem pointing you in the right direction if you pm me. Trust me you won't be sorry. I have >500 songs in Frets on Fire now.

Meh, I hate to necropost, but this really should be mentioned in a review. It was stated earlier that the ripping process can take 8 hours. I have a core2duo at 2.13, 2gbs of ram, an 18x dvd burner, and an hd at 7200. It took me about 8-9 hours just to get the guitar hero 1 songs. For me, it was by far a much better choice to rip them myself. For those of you with a real internet connection, I would definitely suggest bit torrent.

Yeah, my horrible Celeron D took a good 20 hours to rip it all.
While we're on this, I'm annoyed, since it won't run on my x86_64 installs of Linux, and I haven't bothered to set up a 32 bit chroot system yet..