SONIC SICKNESS: GUITAR-CONTROLLER PLATFORMING IN PIECES’ FRET NICE

Unmentioned during or following E3 week is a game I suppose I shouldn’t let slide by any further. The reason was mainly down to the fact that for as long as I’ve known it — since its first days as an Indie Games Fest finalist — I still don’t exactly have a handle on just how it plays.

The long and the short is this: it’s Fret Nice, made by Swedish indie Pieces Interactive, and its claim to the 2008 IGF’s Design Award nominated fame is that it’s played entirely using one of the several handfuls of spare Guitar Hero/Rock Band guitars you’ve now got laying around your house.

Tecmo very, very quietly made the announcement that it’d picked up the game for distribution on Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation Network at E3, and alongside it sent along the first batch of screenshots showing off its new photo-collaged look.

So, right, still, how does it play? The latest trailer above doesn’t show off much but the game’s wicked looking graphic design, so let’s go back a bit to Pieces’ original IGF trailer. I’m presuming it’s changed in the intervening nearly two years, but there it gets a little more clear: your strum bar seems to be an action button, the fret buttons used for — running? — and the star-power tilt controlling jumps.

Tecmo will surely be closing the knowledge gaps in the coming months until its projected 2010 release, which will also be just about the time the trailers’ vaguely Katamari-esque Vibrant Chordblasters theme finally gets unstuck from your head.