Frets on Fire

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Frets On Fire

Developer(s)	Unreal Voodoo
Designer(s)	Sami Kyöstilä
Engine	SDL, PyGame, Python
Release date(s)	August 3, 2006
Genre(s)	Music video game
Mode(s)	Single player
Platform(s)	Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
System requirements	Windows: 128 MB of RAM, a fairly fast OpenGL graphics card (shader support not necessary, antialiasing support recommended), Direct X compatible sound card. Linux: SDL, SDL_ttf, SDL_mixer, 128 MB of RAM, a fairly fast OpenGL graphics card (shader support not necessary, antialiasing support recommended), SDL compatible sound card.
Input	Guitar controller, Keyboard

Frets on Fire is a free, open-source music video game and the winner of the Assembly demo party 2006 game development competition. ^[1]^[2]^[3]^[4] It is written in Python and uses the Amanith library.

1 Gameplay
2 Features
3 Trivia
4 References
5 External links

[edit] Gameplay

Frets on Fire is a Guitar Hero clone, so the player emulates playing the guitar section of a song. Notes appear on the screen, synchronized with the song, and are played by holding the correct "fret buttons" (F1-F5) and pressing the "pick button" (Enter) at the right moment. Streaks of correct notes increase the point multiplier, but a single missed one resets it. While there is no actual goal to meet for any given song, scores can be uploaded to, and compared at, the official website. The game's distinguishing feature is its control system: the keyboard is meant to be picked up and held like a guitar, with the left hand on the fret buttons and the right hand on the pick. ^[5]

[edit] Features

In-game Play

4 difficulty levels (Supaeasy, Easy, Medium, and Amazing).
A tutorial.
A custom song editor.
3 standard songs, along with the ability to download songs made by others and/or make your own.
Joystick support
As of 11/24/06, the update release allows you to import Guitar Hero(tm) or Guitar Hero II songs from the disk if you have a DVD Drive and 500 MB of disk space. This mode is under development, as the ripping process from the Guitar Hero II disk takes over 8 hours on an AMD Athlon 64 3700+ computer.^[6]
There is a community dedicating to the development of new songs for the game.
The instant messaging service Xfire currently supports Frets on Fire.

[edit] Trivia

Some anti-virus programs have been known to report false positives with Frets on Fire. This is because the game is compiled from Python source to an executable file using py2exe, which was also used to make the Backdoor.Rajump keylogger. Apparently an inaccurate virus description crafted from the keylogger caused anti-virus programs to misidentify the game as a virus.