Frets On Fire

This is a popular game where the player pretends to play an electric guitar by using the keyboard in a non-standard way. The screen shows a simplified guitar fret board and a stream of scores moving along the guitar strings. The player has to push down the correct strings and strike the pick when the indicated scores approach the fret. The strings and pick are mapped to specific keys on the keyboard. Visual and acoustic feedback tells the player if the strings where hit correctly, and an overall score is computed based on various performance criteria.

Sound and graphics are great, and additional songs can be downloaded or composed. There is a large active Frets-on-Fire community and players can compare their scores for particular songs. For more information see here. If you are using Ubuntu and you get the error "list index out of range", try downloading the package "fretsonfire-songs-sectoid" using the synaptic package manager.