I Just Discovered Clone Hero

I bet your first experience with Guitar Hero was similar to mine. There is this new game everyone is talking about where you play with a peripheral in the shape of guitar. You shrug it off as another gimmick of the industry trying to get non-gamers to play video games and go about your life. Then one day your at a social gathering about 12 beers of Lakeport (a cheap beer that was available in Canada) deep and someone hands you this plastic guitar with coloured buttons. You grab it and go "what the hell, when in Rome". Then your life is changed forever. Well not really, but it was sooo much fun. I was immediately hooked. It became the thing to do at parties and I was there for it. Then I was like I need this action 24-7 so I went out and bought it.

In game lead guitar song.

I remember it was 2007 and I was in college working at a Zellers (Canadian Department store, think Target but more budget). I went to a different store than where I worked and used my employee discount on Guitar Hero III. Man did I get a ton of hours out of that game. The concept is super simple right? Press the corressponding keys and "strum" the guitar when the screen tells you too. It was like DDR for lazy people. Man was it challenging though. What always screwed me up was hitting Red and Blue at the same time, because they where spaced out not next to each other. Oddly, Green and yellow, same situation, no problem. Its like when this showed up on the screen my brain just malfunctioned. 

So your playing Guitar Hero having the time of your life nothing can top this right? Wrong! Enter Rock Band. Why just jam out with a guitar when you can have a base, drum kit, and microphone to rock out with. This was like Guitar Hero turned up to 11. Rock Band quickly became the new party game. Everyone all knackered  with these fake plastic instruments in there hands stumbling and fumbling through Weezer's Say it Ain't so. Just totally epic. Adding the microphone into this rhythm game world was kind of a stroke of genius. People love getting bombed and belting out tunes at Karaoke, lets mash that into guitar hero. Legends.

The guitar I ended up picking-up. Works Great!!

Wait a minute, the title of this post says Clone Hero why is this muppet babbling on and on about Guitar Hero and Rockband? Because Clone Hero is pretty much that. Its a free instrument rhythm game that you can play with that old GH guitar you got lying around. The website says "Jam out with Drums, 5-fret Guitar, or 6-fret Guitar online or local!" Oh boy did I jam out. The game has an amazing wiki page on how to get things working even a list of compatible guitars and links to the drivers you will need to get them running on your PC. The base game comes with a handful of songs that I am not familiar with. I assume royalty free tracks. The game is designed however to accept custom tracks. A quick google search and you have a catalogue of over a 100,000 tracks. Again, getting it to work was a breeze. Download, extract, drop in the right folder. Boom! You can also customize the "highways" (the guitar neck thing the coloured notes fly on) and the backgrounds with static images or videos. You know I love games with customization.

The whole thing is a blast. If you loved Guitar Hero you are really going to dig Clone Hero. You can DL the game here:

https://clonehero.net/

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

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Guitar Hero and Rock Band are the intellectual properties of Harmonix

Clone Hero is the intellectual property of .. not sure their name but this is their site https://clonehero.net/

This article is subject to Fair Use (US Law) and Fair Dealing (Canadian Law) as it is informational in purpose and is a critique of the product. All rights and credits go directly to the owners. No copyright infringement is intended