A Game For Your Mac That Makes Music To Your Ears

Confession time. I’m not much for games on my Mac. Everyone says that PCs are better for games anyway. Unless you’re running Windows on your Mac, then the Mac is decent.

So I hear. Me? I have two games categories. One set of games for my kids to play on their Mac. That gives me time to clean up whatever they did before they starting playing games on the Mac.

The other category of games that I put on my Mac are the free ones, and, frankly, there’s a few, but not many. The Mac is better at games than in years past, thanks to Boot Camp and Intel processors.

The problem is that I’m not better at games than I was in years past. Hey, I’m an adult. I have children, a job, responsibilities. Playing serious games on my Mac would only make the neighbors nervous, and they twitch when I back the car out of the garage.

Games are for the young. Not even the young at heart, which I am. I’m also cheap at heart and that’s where I draw the line. Paying for games.

With great pride and with more than a little trepidation, I’m here to tell you that Frets of Fire is a hot game if you know anything about guitars and have more than four fingers (but spread over two hands) to use on a game you couldn’t master unless you went back in time.

To when you were younger and games mattered.

Frets of Fire is a game of musical skill, which, thanks to a father and mother who understood and shared the benefits of being multilingual and had a full basement where the horns and drums and guitars could play and not drive neighbors insane or cats to commit suicide.

It’s simple. You play the guitar with your fingers and the Mac’s keyboard. You can play songs from other Frets of Fire users or compose your own with the song editor.

It’ll even import Guitar Hero I and II songs, which is especially important for the younger generation that thinks tattoos and metal hanging from body parts is cool. Oh, and know what Guitar Hero is.

For me it was just plain old fun. I have longer fingers, eight of them, and slightly shorter thumbs which can be used to play a musical instrument or to tell the neighbor’s dog to hit the road or visit the inside of the outside trash compactor.

The real trick with any game, so far as a mommy of three who knows lots of kid games but none you pay money for, is to have a little skill, mixed with some talent, mixed with desire to have fun.

OK, piano lessons and guitar lessons made me a digital diva of sorts, and, somehow or another, sitting down with Frets of Fire made me laugh, cry, try harder, and got my kids to sit down, behave.

All the while they tried to figure out why mommy was laughing and crying at the same time, yet wondered why their Mac didn’t make the same kinds of noise. Uh, music.

Frets of Fire is just fun, despite the fact that it runs on Windows PCs, too, and is open source (free), and only runs on Intel Macs. But it’s fun. And free.

If you don’t have any musical skill beyond the Recorder and Kazoo, but you know how to type and use all 10 fingers, you might be surprised at how addicting Frets of Fire can be.

No, there’s no frets. I pretty much guarantee your Mac won’t catch on fire because you’re playing so fast. So, no frets and no fire. With a little work there’s music. And fun. And it’s all free.

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Off Topic Note: Guess what? Former Mac360 writer Kate Mac is back online after dumping Windows and re-embracing the Mac. Again.