Ever heard of the very popular game for the PlayStation 2, called Guitar Hero? Until recently, I only vaguely picked it up here and there, but not being a big PlayStation gamer, I never payed much attention. That is, until today. A friend of mine gave me a link to Frets On Fire, which claims to be the PC variant of Guitar Hero. Seeing it was free, I downloaded it and gave it a try, and I have to admit, it's addictive!

Allow me to give you a small introduction on this game.

First of all, start by downloading Frets On Fire and installing it on your computer.

Let's get started and begin the fun by selecting one of the available songs, there only three out of the box, but you can download additional songs.

The selected song will load and you'll notice five frets above the snares. These frets can be selected using the F1 to F5 buttons, but there are also instructions available on using your guitar hero controller. After a while, you'll notice various notes coming towards you, the goal is to pick the correct snare when the note is around the same position of the frets. You can pick a snare by pressing the ENTER key while holding a fret.

Some notes will be very short, while others have a long trail behind them, simply hold the fret down long enough to play the entire note. An example of this can be seen in the video I recorded of Anthrax - Caught In A Mosh on the left side which has some very long notes in the beginning followed by lots of short ones towards the end.

The better you play, the higher your score will be. A counter will be ticking up in the upper left corner, keeping track of the amount of successful notes played in succession, while in the upper right corner you'll see the bonus meter build up per note. This meter will tick up per 10 correct notes played and give you up to a 4x multiplier for your score, an incorrect note will reset it back to 1.

To make your ears like the song, you'd better play as many correct notes as possible, because missing a note will be audible due to the guitar suddenly falling silent. It's also possible to make a wrong note stand out very clearly. There are various degrees of difficulty, making you hit multiple notes together and shorter after each other in increasing difficulty. Since I'm still quite bad at it, the video I recorded was played on the easiest difficulty.

Don't feel sorry to play on the lowest difficulty though, the most valuable feature of the game is being the fact that it's a great party game! The laughs and hours of fun you can have with this game are amazing, especially since it's free!

Another nice addition is the possibility to change the look and feel through the use of mods, and even introduce multi-player functionality.

Frets On Fire managed to make me love this genre of games, where the simplicity makes it so addictive you'd play it all day long.

If you'll excuse me now, I have to prepare for my big rock concert! :)

Recently, I bought a new DVD player/recorder with an internal hard disk. One of the nice features I discovered when playing with it is a free tv guide! GUIDE+ shows me all programs on the major television channels in my region and allows me to easily select them for recording with one press of a button.

A few times a day, my DVD player goes out to a specific host channel, which contains all tv guide data needed to feed the GUIDE+ system, and syncs its internal guide to the latest version, making it far more trustworthy then your usual paper-based tv guide and also without the cost of buying one. Having a guide stored on the hard disk of your recorder is has some nice advantages. No more entering times manually, just select the program you want and hit the record button and it's done.

Another nice feature is the ability to filter for movies of a specific genre. Want to see which Crime movies are on this week? Apply a filter and you get a nice list, ready to be scheduled for recording.

This system is available in most European countries, supported by quite a few big brands. If you got a GUIDE+ supported player and live in a supported country, it's as simple as configuring your postal code, waiting a few hours until it has retrieved the guide for the first time, and you're ready to go. Program information is usually available for the coming week for most big stations, while the smaller stations are updated with information for the next two days. Have a look at the detailed list per country for more info on the stations and the amount of data supplied.

When this becomes available in the cheapest recorders on the market, I'm pretty sure everyone's grandmother will be able to record something, point and record! :)