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Frets on Fire - Guitar Hero for Linux/Windows

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the flailing-on-your-keyboard dept.

abyssi writes "Frets on Fire, for Linux and Windows, play with your keyboard-alternative to the ever-so-popular Guitar Hero, has been released at ASSEMBLY '06 demo party's Game Development competition together with 13 other experimental, indie games including a new game from the creators of the popular Dismount series. ASSEMBLY '06 runs from 3rd to 6th of August in Helsinki, Finland and enjoys over 5000 persons in attendance. A 24h/day webcast is available at AssemblyTV.net starting Thursday 3.8.2006 at 14:00."

1 of 69 comments (clear)

  1. Re:...why? by merreborn · · Score: 4, Informative

    I actually downloaded this and played it, and I have this to offer:

    1) They came up with a novel control scheme that's not too far off from being as good as the guitar hero controller:
    Pick up your keyboard. Place your left hand under the F1 - F4 keys. Your right index finger should fall on F1 -- this is the "First Fret", F2 is the second, etc. Hold the keyboard like you would the neck of a guitar.

    The default "Pick" key is enter, but I think I'd suggest space.

    However, I was unable to actually play this game correctly, as I'm on a laptop, and as such, cannot "pick up" my keyboard as described. I've got keyboards around, but none of those damn PS/2 to USB adaptors.

    It's really pretty decent -- it seems to respond to input almost identically to guitar hero, and it has a song editor built in, so it could potentially take off like Step Mania did. However, it only ships with 3 songs, and I couldn't find any user contributed songs via google.

    Anyway, the aforementioned control scheme makes this a lot closer to playing guitar hero than playing step mania on the keyboard is to playing DDR.