SING AWAY YOUR VOICE AND ROLL YOUR WRISTS

Sex, dru-- lemonade and rock'n'roll! Party playing makes PC streetwise.

The party playing enraving everybody concentrates on Guitar Hero's and SingStar's holy duality [trinity of two], but the joy has been unfairly biased towards console players. Now the aware PC partyer gets his trip from free, open source copies. The same goes for Mac and Linux parties, if there are any.

Guitar heroing is promoted by the Finnish Frets on Fire, which won the Assembly 2006 [game development competition]. It has developed constantly, especially in modders' hands. For singer's delight, SingStar's karaoke experience is precisely emulated by Ultrastar Deluxe. By now at least should the grey box owner close Excel and push his inner rock star to the estrade.

Singing is my joy and my job

SingStar, springing into fame on PlayStation, has a simple concept: scored karaoke. On the screen flows, in addition to the lyrics, a set of pitch bars, that the player tries to follow with his singing. The best singstar isn't the awesomest interpreter but the one who manages to most precisely imitate the original performer yoiking in the background.

PC gold throats have for long been forced to watch from the side as the SingStar extra disc selection grows. The distress call was answered by Ultrastar, a down-to-UI accurate copy of Singstar, whose more recent branch Ultrastar Deluxe is all-around working and recommendable package.

Ultrastar Deluxe is freely available on the net, and there is one song bundled with it. Any one mark [obsolete Finnish currency] mic will do as the singing equipment, and the SingStar microphones work too. In total one can bolt up to a broad six of them to a machine, but an extra display is required for more than three players. The visuals of the game have room for adjustment, so slower PCs may also be transformed into party machines.

After singing one gets to see comprehensive score statistics and there is also a party mode where the basic singing is refreshed by special rules. Ultrastar Deluxe also contains a couple of small extra gadgets like a metronome that helps staying in rhythm.

Compared to SingStar, the only real flaw is that the game doesn't directly play back the singer's own voice, and that the performance cannot be saved. The problem is solved by hacking Windows settings, and there are detailed instructions for this on the Ultrastar Deluxe website. Coming versions will most likely fix this beauty flaw too.

For satisfying the singing nicotines, one should always keep the game installed on one's laptop. This way you may, for example, also entertain your fellow passangers on a train trip.

Guitar, heaven and stars

A grandma from Pihtipudas called and asked what the heck is Guitar Hero, so I'll summarize: it is a rhythm game where chords flowing in the pace of the rock are attempted by one to strum with the buttons in the right time and in the right rhythm. The spirit is close enough to real guitaring and it is fun as hell.

The winning recipe following Frets on Fire has kept the PC musicians on the rock for over a year already. Frets, meant to be played funnily keyboard in an armpit, now also supports Guitar Hero guitars, as long as a suitable adapter or USB plug is available. Playing the keyboard quickly loses its shine because, even though the idea is funny, the touch isn't as good as with a toy guitar. Annoyingly the whammy bar does not and will not work.

The basic Frets has became a polished into a stable and solid ensemble, but no really big new features have been added. On the modside the attitude is different: the most whopping modification, RF-mod, bolts on the game multiplayer, bass tracks, party mode, better hammering and pull-offs, and a possibility to switch into a very guitarhero-like appearance, all the way down to the round frets - not to mention the numerous minor adjustments made. The creator of the self-runnable RF-mod has recently became responsible for the development of the actual Frets on Fire, and it is to be expected that the nice features of the mod will land on the main game as well.

Another mod worth trying is Hering Mod, which brings in thumping the drum tracks and the possibility to fail in playing songs.

The scores grinded in Frets on Fire may be sent for others to admire, but even more important, one can setup a score board shared among friends. The best of the net cannot be beaten, but the friends can be, sometimes at least.

All settings may be tuned to meet one's taste, and there is enough adjustment available for the visuals too, so that the machine does not need to be the fastest.

So, what about the songs?

To each game, one can get an unlimited number of extra songs in three ways: hard, easy or illegal. Making songs with the internal editors requires hard skills and patience. The easy way is to buy or borrow SingStar and Guitar Hero discs and convert them into a format supported by the games. Frets of Fire can do this itself while Ultrastar Deluxe depends on an outsourced application, available from the game's website. Sneaking to the grey area, in the case on Ultrastar, is downloading a file containing the lyrics from the Internet and rips the song itself from a CD. If the song is not exactly the same length as that used by the creator of the text file, one has to edit the file.

Ugly rumors tell that hundreds of ready-made songs for each game are available in the dark alleys of the Internet, but withing the bounds of Finnish legislation hoarding those is not permitted. For Frets on Fire there is also a large amount of free indie stuff, but not yet for Ultrastar so far.

Both Frets on Fire with its mods and Ultrastar Deluxe are honorably polished ensembles which do not need to be ashamed in front of their paragons. Frets on Fire is not visually up to Guitar Hero's level, and the games do not contain as extra gimmicks, such as campaign and other modes.

The core substance, burning guitar stretching and alone or together work excellently, and that's enough. Even though Guitar Hero III has been ported to be PC and SingStar's PS3 version includes a seductive net butique, these games can be recommended without conditions, because nothing sells as well as free.

Translation by Lasse Kärkkäinen, trying to capture the spirit of the original article, written by Jouni Utriainen in Pelit 4/2008. The original article can be downloaded as a PDF from http://www.pelit.fi/index.php?id=69278

Pelit in Finland's largest computer gaming magazine, with a circulation of over 30000.