By Alec Meer on October 20th, 2010 at 1:35 pm.
Not sure if you’ve heard much about Guitar Hero [word redacted] ah, tribute Instant Jam, but basically it’s a streaming browser thing that lets you play rhythm-action adaptations of theoretically any song for free. As long as you have it on your hard drive, buy the track from the game’s store or use one of the built-in songs, anyway.
They’ve just opened it up to embedding on other sites – which means you can play the bally thing in its entirety below. A game! An actual game! Playable on RPS! We should do more of that. Have a play, then go shout obscure songs and impossible high scores at each other in the comments below. Let the great Kate Bush wars of 2008 begin again…
Worth noting I’ve shrunk the game slightly from its intended size to fit our page design, so if you hit any graphical/interface peculiarities it might be that. Seems to work OK here though. In terms of your own songs, it takes its time to add them, and the auto-gameification means you probably won’t find the notes to be as neatly-matched as pre-tailored ones. But see how it goes.
But! What if you don’t have any songs to play on this? Well, how about the theme tune to award-winning* games radio show and Friends Of RPS One Life Left? You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, here you go.
* In the same way we’re award-winning, anyway.
20/10/2010 at 13:41 NeonBlackJack says:
whoo-hoo… It doesn’t work for me!
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20/10/2010 at 19:25 BAReFOOt says:
Just go and grab Frets On Fire. It’s free. It’s an actual program. It exists since the dawn of times. There are tons of songs for it (including all Guitar Hero ones). It works nicely with a normal keyboard. It runs smoothly. And it doesn’t have some low-quality 3D engine just to pointlessly render a stage including ugly stage clowns. ;)
Well that should be enough. :)
20/10/2010 at 13:50 dobber says:
this is fucking awful, really. the mouseover is about half a cm off, you can only play from a list of weak pop crap unless you want to load your own which is unrelated to the buttons
it’s just a scheme to flog mp3s isn’t it?
20/10/2010 at 13:53 Lewie Procter says:
Psh, lightweight.
I shall be playing it to AN ENTIRE EPISODE OF OLL.
20/10/2010 at 13:55 Faldrath says:
Me, I got stuck at “currently finding your music”. By the way, does this support FLAC?
20/10/2010 at 14:07 DrGonzo says:
I left my PC with it open, scanning my harddrive. 30 minutes later, it still had nothing. Don’t even want to try it anymore.
20/10/2010 at 18:30 Marcin says:
No FLAC support yet. The scanning takes a while, and the matching takes even longer, we’re working on that. You can always try to play songs manually by clicking on a song and then choosing “Browse” instead of “Purchase”.
20/10/2010 at 19:05 Marcin says:
Woh, my bad. I am informed IJam does in fact support FLAC. Leaps and bounds! :P
20/10/2010 at 14:04 Lobotomist says:
If you want to play actual real good guitar hero port for PC – try this
http://www.gamesx.com.br/jogos/guitar_hero/guitar_hero.asp
20/10/2010 at 14:16 devlocke says:
That was really weird. I let it scan for my music, but nothing happened in the ‘game’ to suggest that it was done, but ‘So Alive’ by Love and Rockets started playing (which I do have on my computer). I clicked around a bit trying to find a way to play the game to that song, or any other for that matter, and couldn’t, then hit the ‘Back’ button. The song kept playing, even tho the ‘game’ wasn’t even in my browser anymore. Closing the tab killed the music.
20/10/2010 at 14:18 techno65535 says:
The hell? It says it’s not available to my OS. Not that it won’t run, but not available. But it does say it’ll run on Mac and win7. Sorry, but it seems like someone doesn’t like linux seeing as they made it for the other 2 OSs out there.
20/10/2010 at 14:22 blainemono says:
The thing with all those play-whatever-mp3-you-want guitar hero tributes is that they suck incredible amounts of ass without master records or whatever those things are called.
See, when you miss a note in guitar hero, you get an unpleasant sound and the guitar part turns off for a while, but the song keeps playing.
Here if you miss a note you get an unpleasant sound, but since the game doesn’t know what part of the song you are supposed to be playing it mutes the whole thing.
It sounds horrible!
HORRIBLE!
HOOOOORRRIIBLE!!!!!
20/10/2010 at 18:26 Marcin says:
… on the other hand it’s free to play and contains a library of tracks bigger than all the Rock Band/Guitar Hero games combined (and growing).
Something for something.
20/10/2010 at 14:23 Faldrath says:
Well, one good thing came out of this fiasco. I loaded Audiosurf again. Mmmm, Audiosurf.
20/10/2010 at 14:27 9of9 says:
Well, it’s playing random songs every time you’re in the ‘main menu’ out of those on my computer. However, it only recognises four songs as actually being under ‘My Songs’. Moreover, any time I do try to play any track, on any difficulty, an error pops up saying ‘Error starting song’.
20/10/2010 at 14:50 jergason says:
“This site requires that you Connect with Facebook.”
You’ll never take me alive, Facebook. Also, why is Connect Capitalized? Are they trying to make it a Proper Verb much like Proper Nouns?
20/10/2010 at 15:14 Clovis says:
Languages evolve, man. The new Rule on Capitalization is: Capitalize all Important Words, or anything you want to Emphasize.
20/10/2010 at 16:57 Dances to Podcasts says:
or not. it’s, like, your choice, man.
20/10/2010 at 17:04 Sam C. says:
Everything Old is New again! This is excellent News!
20/10/2010 at 18:23 Marcin says:
Because Facebook :|
20/10/2010 at 15:01 Doug F says:
This seems… not good.
You’re welcome to take another run at the king in Audiosurf though. I wouldn’t mind an excuse to compulsively play that song again.
20/10/2010 at 15:18 TychoCelchuuu says:
Opera not supported. Fantastic!
20/10/2010 at 15:19 Pepelusky says:
Not available for my OS.
Oh my hopes of playing something in the lunchtime are gone ):
20/10/2010 at 16:08 Daniel Klein says:
It just sits there saying “loading” for about 15 minutes now, cycling between loading screens. It didn’t work for me either when you linked to it on facebook a while back.
20/10/2010 at 16:36 castle says:
This would be interesting if you could use a guitar controller (with the typical chords/strumming action). As it is, it’s just tapping numbers in an approximation of your song’s rhythm. Not so exciting.
20/10/2010 at 18:22 Marcin says:
You can. Any USB guitar will work.
21/10/2010 at 05:08 squidlarkin says:
My original GH1 controller plugged in through a Dualshock->USB adapter most definitely doesn’t work. And options to manually configure it are completely absent. I’d use joytokey, but I still wouldn’t be able to strum…
Which is sad because I was really excited after playing it at PAX. The charts are quite good, and I’m picky about that sort of thing. Just get the technical issues sorted out, please!
20/10/2010 at 16:44 Humble says:
@Lobotomist
Thank you, that was actually really good (much to my surprise). After playing two songs, it felt just spot on in both accuracy and difficulty. Recommended!
20/10/2010 at 17:50 FragginDragon says:
This game is rather fun. It did good justice to the guitar solo in Digital Love by Daft Punk. Reminds me of the good old days of DDR, FFR and Stepmania. :P
20/10/2010 at 18:41 Sagan says:
There’s also Rhythm Zone on Steam which allows you to play any song. It works like Audiosurf in that it really allows you to play any song and procedurally generates the keys.
It works well enough, too.
20/10/2010 at 19:09 crash7800 says:
FLAC is supported!
20/10/2010 at 19:11 MungeParty says:
Yes, it does have FLAC support.
Also, you should be able to go into settings and add additional music folders. By default, the game only searches the My Music folder on Windows and the iTunes library locations, so if you’re seeing no matches you may want to add your music folder. The song discovery can take some time on slower computers or computers with lots of music, but it’s optimized to find matches quickly. If this isn’t the behavior you’re experiencing, let us know your hardware specs and software setup so we can look into the problem and fix it.
20/10/2010 at 19:29 the wiseass says:
No Opera support, Facebook integration, data mining, no thank you!
20/10/2010 at 20:39 Devan says:
This. And the prominent advertisements. And the bugginess.
20/10/2010 at 19:40 Heynes says:
Cute, but ultimately uninteresting. When are we going to get something along the lines of Audiosurf again?
20/10/2010 at 21:09 seras says:
but..we already HAVE Audiosurf…why would we need something that’s “along the lines of it”?
21/10/2010 at 10:32 Thants says:
Because the basic idea of dynamically generating gameplay based on your music is fantastic, and it would be great to see it applied to other types of games.
20/10/2010 at 19:50 rusty says:
Don’t switch tabs while the game is loading, that will cause the cursor to lose its place and coordinates to shift.
Also, go to settings and check that you have the folder with your songs added to the scanner list. If it is not the default music library on your PC or the downloads folder, the scanner will not find it unless you specify a directory.
Keep an open mind a learn how things work before condemning them.
20/10/2010 at 19:55 funfingers says:
sweet! great selection zeppelin muse linkin park! it’s cool you can buy mp3s and play them
20/10/2010 at 21:52 spork says:
FAIL.
Audiosurf. It’s better than this nonsense and all other garbage Guitar Hero and Rock Band games combined.
And it’s only 10 bux on Steam. And you don’t need a retarded plastic guitar controller, nor do you have to play a knockoff version of Guitar Hero.
21/10/2010 at 05:18 squidlarkin says:
I’ve heard this opinion a lot, and it’s always from people who don’t usually like rhythm games, which makes sense because Audiosurf is something completely different. It has you moving any time *except* on the beat, for one thing. It’s a great game and an amazing technical achievement, but it doesn’t scratch the rhythm game itch.
21/10/2010 at 13:23 bill says:
this reminds me – last time i tried Frets on Fire it wasn’t fun because i had to use the keyboard – but since then i bought a wireless keyboard which could totally be held in a guitar style! I should maybe check it out again….
wireless keyboard guitar has to be cooler than air guitar, right?
22/10/2010 at 18:00 Lemming77 says:
Wow, this is terrible. I’ve spent 20-25 minutes here, during which time I played two songs. The rest has been watching “something weird happen” in the menus. It’s not a bad game. Problem is it’s near impossible to get that far.
31/10/2010 at 10:02 Sarp says:
Hey.. I got really shocked when i read other people’s repplies.. Saying this game is so bad..
Its not.. ITs awesome.. I loved Guitar Hero.. And im loving this being able to play on facebook and stuff.. And do you people realize how freaking expsensive it is to be able to play the acctual guitar hero ?! Without the music that you can pick…
So i really liked the game.. And after finding out about it i played it for a whole night.. Than i realized the program didnt took all my songs.. So i changed the file location to where all my music files are.. and that was the end of the game for me.. It says scaning for music and after 15minutes it gives an error and tells me to refresh or update directX etc.. I updated everything written.. Still no good.. This error message also suggest me to play on the Flash version isntead of the Java version.. When i do that.. i just don’t get any songs.. Non.. But i hear songs that i have on the background…
I was able to play on java at Google Chrome and Internet Explorer… Now i can’t play in both.. I changed the file searc location again.. No good… Game is dead for me.. I installed mozilla firefox.. Tried it on that… Still no good.. Please help me fix this… I want to get back in there.
14/11/2010 at 00:44 Cheeetar says:
It seems that the guys who made Instant Jam have gone under because the site and the game are no longer accessible.