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GuitarHero posts

Filed under: Fun, Games, Time-Wasters

Guitar Hero meets typing tutor - Today's Time Waster

Up Beat
We need to start off this post with a quick warning. Please look away if you have something important to do today. If you continue reading you will get nothing productive done for the next few hours.

Up Beat is an addictive Flash-based game in the vein of Dance Dance Revolution or Guitar Hero. Except instead of a dance pad or a guitar, you play with your keyboard. If you can't figure out the rules from the screenshot, little bars shoot their way toward you at high speeds. You have to hit the corresponding key at just the moment the little bar arrives. The fact that the action is timed to annoying techno music either makes the game a lot harder, or a lot easier to play, depending on your perspective.

There are three levels of difficulty, and 9 songs to choose from. To be honest, they all sound kind of the same, but that doesn't make the game any less fun to play.

[via Random Good Stuff]

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Windows, Open Source

Piano Hero: Learn to play piano, have fun?

Piano Hero
I took piano lessons for a couple years when I was a kid. I never became a virtuoso, but maybe if I had had Piano Hero I could have. It's an open source edutainer in the mold of Guitar Hero and the like, except with a piano instead of a guitar. It's a bit rough around the edges and definitely doesn't have the eye candy appeal of its console brethren, but if you want to improve your real piano skills (rather than your fake guitar skills), it might be right up your alley. Piano Hero works with any MIDI music file you throw at it, but currently it doesn't sync up to a MIDI keyboard--that feature will come with the 0.5.0 release promised later this month. Until then you'll just have to play along and pretend.

The Piano Hero web site seems to be sputtering a bit just now, but you can download the program for Windows from SourceForge.

Filed under: Audio, Fun, Games, Windows, Linux, Freeware, Time-Wasters

Frets on Fire - Todays Time Waster

Frets on FireHave you noticed the seemingly unending buzz around the PlayStation 2 game Guitar Hero? If you don't have a PlayStation, but are curious about that type of game, you might like to check out Frets on Fire, a free guitar-themed music game for Windows and Linux. Although it doesn't feature the licensed popular music that the commercial name-brand game contains, it still has some pretty hot tracks and frantic gameplay.

The game has some serious attitude, the likes of which you won't see in most (but not all) retail games. It's not graphic, but the language in the game could be considered somewhat colorful or offensive to some. I realize that's not really a big deal for most, but it's worth mentioning. You can view a video demo of Frets on Fire after the jump (note, as the game does, the demo includes a couple of potentially offensive words).

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The World's Hardest Game 2.0 - Time Waster

So, just how good at time waster games are you? Think you've got the stuff? Well, The World's Hardest Game 2.0 doesn't think you do. Yes, amazingly, it's possible to have a sequel to a game called "The World's Hardest Game". It doesn't seem logically possible, since if the first one was actually the world's hardest, how could another one come along and share the moniker? It made me doubt the name in the first place. That is, until I tried the game. The mechanics of the game are very simple. You are a small red square, ...

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