Soosck

Believe it or not, GNU/Linux is already an amazing game platform. You might find this statement entirely implausible or rather incredulous but I really mean it. I didn’t know this until last evening when I was desperately looking for an open source alternative for the popular game “Guitar Hero”. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting much, in fact, I was preparing myself for a total flop, or yet another monotonous copycat of GH. Oh boy… how wrong was I. Not only did I found the sort of game I was looking for, but also, I stumbled upon some other cool open source music games that totally changed my perception about open source games. But don’t take my words for it, just go and search for a very specific genre of games. I assure you that eventually you will find some quality open source alternatives. I do believe some of these games can be competent competitors to their commercial counterparts if they get more attention from the community.

For this reason, I’ve decided to compile a list of music games that are available for GNU/Linux. Since I personally am a very recent convert to the marvels of open source gaming I don’t claim that these are all the music games that are available for the platform. However, I think they are a nice start for people new to the whole idea. Also, I found most of these games to be very modest in hardware requirement. As a matter of fact, I’ve played all of them on Hetty (my EeePC netbook) without a gliche.

1- Frets on Fire X

Frets on Fire X

Frets on Fire is probably the most well-implemented open source alternative to guitar-hero alike games. You play the game by holding your keyboard like a guitar and pressing F1 through F5 keys for fretting and pressing RETURN for picking. Although I have to admit that I couldn’t hold my EeePC like that so the game was a bit difficult for me.
Personally I prefer Frets on Fire X (a famous fork of FoF) since it’s much more customizable and you can download copious amount of themes and songs from the community website to embellish the game.

Frets on Fire

2- UltraStar Deluxe

UltraStar DX is an open source karaoke game similar to Singstar game. The game is simple. You hold a microphone and sing along the game to score. I’m still experimenting with this game.

3- StepMania

StepMania is a venerable open source alternative to commercial rhythm game Dance Dance Revolution.  The game is very easy to play with a keybaord but if you want to have the ultimate playing experience, you’d better have a dance pad.

4- PyDance

In many ways, PyDance resembles StepMania with less-stellar graphics and customization options. Still a fun little game to have on the list.

5- oFlute

Despite my sincere efforts to run this game on Debian, I’m still stuck with getting it to work on my machine. You might have a better luck.

Others…

The following two music games are neither open source nor free of charge. But since they are indie games and you can play them on GNU/Linux I thought they’d be nice to be on our list. They are actually very ace games:

a. Auditorium

A simple and unique puzzle music game developed in Flash (so it’s for all platforms). You can play a demo on their website.

b. Osmos

You might be surprised that I included Osmos here since it’s mostly a physics game. However, I think it has a potent musical element that makes it also a kinda music game. I played this game nearly a year ago (I think) when I was still a Legacy OS user. Now I’m glad that there is a GNU/Linux port for this astonishing game.

That’s it for now!  Happy GNU/Linux playing and feel free to drop a comment if you know any other music games.