So I’ve been playing Frets on Fire occasionally on my PC and it’s pretty cool but it’s lacking “something”. Frets on Fire is a Open Source version of the game Guitar Hero. One of the biggest problems has been trying to use the keyboard as the guitar, it just doesn’t work.

So while wondering around the mall (I do this a lot it appears) I stumbled upon Guitar Hero II for the Xbox 360, the cool thing about this is that the Xbox 360 uses plan USB controllers so “In theory” all I needed to do was buy the game+controller and get the controller to work on my PC. After purchasing it I’m not sure exactly what went through my mind, but on further wondering’s around the mall I noticed that Xbox 360’s were on special… and well yip you guessed it I became the proud new owner of a Xb0x 360.

So whats it like going over to the “Dark Side” and joining the cult of Microsoft? Well I have to admit that so far the console is awesome, admittedly I’ve only got Guitar Hero II for it but its actually not that bad, although in true Microsoft style after sticking the DVD in for Guitar Hero II I had to first install an update before I could play. The other big problem is the fan is noisy, but if this is what stops the console from having a nuclear meltdown (as the early ones did) I guess I can put up with.

What’s Guitar Hero II like? One word… Awesome, although that doesn’t adequately describe it. After setting everything up I played for about 6hours straight, then played 6 hours again the next day. Admittedly after all this playing my left hand, arm and shoulder would no longer work and my legs and feet felt like I had run a marathon, but it was so much fun. One word of advise never play on Easy, it gives you a false sense of skill and it takes longer to get used to using four or more fingers to push the fret buttons (speaking from personal experience.).

Ryan (my flat mate) and I have had a lot of fun playing the Game and while neither of us are scoring very high scores yet, its still fun to goof off in front of the TV with a big plastic guitar living the dream of being a Rock Star.

Of course I’m going to have to see what else I can do with the Xbox, I’m planning on having a go at messing around with some games programming perhaps and might take a look at getting Linux to run on it or at the very least get it to stream video/music from my Linux machines.

I’ve still got to try work out how to get Xbox Live to work, if anyone has got this working before please let me know.

Below are some photo’s of the game, controller, Xbox + mess of wires and Ryan (my flat mate) playing the game.
As usual I do not appear in any of the pictures, advantage of being the camera man.