Rock Out for Free: How to Escape Paying for Guitar Hero/Rock Band Games

Those fancy controllers cost a lot, and for a meager playlist of about 70 songs, £30 ($50) is often felt to be a lot of money for the game disc itself. Here’s some free software you can try instead, because rocking out on your keyboard can be a great way to pass the time and is just as satisfying as if you were doing it on a plastic guitar.

Frets on Fire

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By far the best is Frets on Fire. It’s an open source game that emulates Guitar Hero extremely accurately, with hammer-ons and all well implemented, with official servers for high scores. You can make custom songs for it out of any MP3 or ogg file too, if you’re that way inclined, and a huge database full of other people’s songs can be found here.

The original version can be found on Sourceforge, but what you really want is the pimped out version Frets on Fire X, or “FoFix”. FoFix adds a “Rock Meter” (thereby enabling you to fail songs you play particularly badly, adding an element of challenge), Star Power, support for custom themes, bonuses for doing well in solos and so on, which I believe makes it a lot more fun.

To download, see the Frets on Fire wiki or visit FoFix on Google Code

Here are some videos for purposes of demonstration and comparison:

Ordinary FoF in action

FoFix version of FoF in action

JamLegend

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Another game you can try out is JamLegend. Frets on Fire is in every way the best free game of its kind available, but JamLegend has two distinct advantages that make it worthy of note even with such strong competition: it plays in your web browser, so there’s no need to install (makes it perfect for school/workplace), and secondly, it has multiplayer online play and social features that Frets on Fire hasn’t got any of yet.

As it’s so quick and easy to get into, I won’t go into depth explaining it here; one minute of your time clicking on the link above and you can make your own descision. It doesn’t quite have the same music variety as Frets on Fire as it’s music is all indie, but it’s got some great tunes if you dig around a bit (Canon Rock by Jerry C is there for example, play it as it is utterly awesome).

These two games are the best available for their purposes. There are others, like Freetar, Guitar Zero, and so forth, so look those up if you want, but trust me as I’ve tried them all; FoF is pretty much the way to go as they’re working on the same features JamLegend has now, and when they’re implemented it will have a pretty much complete monopoly on the free guitar gaming world.

NOW GO ROCK OUT!