The small, inexpensive nature of downloadable games has made them a haven for experimental game design. One of the more original titles on the way is Tecmo's Fret Nice, a platformer that is designed to be played with a Guitar Hero or Rock Band guitar controller. Add in a slick and stylish visual approach and you've got one of the more intriguing titles to look forward to for XBLA and PSN.
It takes a little while to wrap your head around Fret Nice -- playing a platfomer with a guitar controller isn't the most intuitive of setups. The green button on the neck is used for moving to the left while the red goes right. The middle button, colored yellow, is used for jumping. The strum bar is hit to climb up or down ropes. You'll have to play a level or two before this becomes intuitive, but soon enough you'll find your fingers less entangled.
At first glance, it might seem like the guitar controller is a bit unnecessary. That's before you get into the combat portion of Fret Nice. As you work through each level, various goofy looking creatures will get in the way. Some will have one or more eyes, mouths, hair follicles or band-aids. The number and type of facial features is the key to destroying these monsters. One eye means that you should jump in the air, then play a single note of your choice. Two eyes mean that you should play that note twice. Two eyes and a mouth indicates that the enemy can be killed by first playing a note twice, and then playing a different note once. The music you play matches with the background music, so you'll find that each time you jump to attack an enemy, you're adding to the music with a new riff.
If you don't have a guitar controller -- or simply don't want to use one -- Fret Nice can be played with a standard controller. The general platforming is a bit easier with a normal control set up, but some of the novelty is lost and dishing out combo note attacks isn't quite as elegant.
We don't provide the 'easy to program for' console that they [developers] want, because 'easy to program for' means that anybody will be able to take advantage of pretty much what the hardware can do, so the question is what do you do for the rest of the nine and half years? It's a learning process. - SCEI president Kaz Hirai
It's a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they're like, "Oh my God that's so cool, I'm gonna go buy it." So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they've showed it to someone else who then go out and buy it and so on. Everyone I know bought one and nobody turns it on. - Epic Games president Mike Capps
We have a real culture of thrift. The goal that I had in bringing a lot of the packaged goods folks into Activision about 10 years ago was to take all the fun out of making video games. - Activision CEO Bobby Kotick
