JamLegend is well on its way to becoming the latest online gaming craze. A product of LaunchBox Digital, a Washington, D.C. based early-stage startup incubator, – sorry, they prefer to be called accelerator – JamLegend brings Guitar Hero style gaming to your browser. No need to buy any fancy controller, your keyboard will do just fine. You can even hold it upside down like a guitar if you so please.
Overview
True to Guitar Hero style, game play has remained fairly unchanged. You control 5 keys (like guitar frets), and the enter key for strumming when each note arrives.
Although, you only generally only need to control 3 keys in easy mode, and so on.
JamLegend starts getting interesting when you take into consideration some of the multi-player features and achievement system. Each song completed accrues you points as well as improves or hurts your global rating, depending on how your performance compares to your past performances. The global rating is part of a ladder ranking system making it easy to find how you and your friends have been performing compared to each other.
There are also a number of achievements you can complete that range from hitting a 750-note streak during a game, to inviting 3 friends. These achievements don’t affect your global rating but nonetheless appear on your profile page and add-on to your number of “groupies.”
There are two forms of multi-player gameplay on JamLegend. You can invite a friend to participate in an asynchronous duel, where each of you complete a game on your own time and the winner is displayed on the duels page. There are also showdowns that are in real-time and players can see each others’ scores as they play.
On the order of business, JamLegend does have some links on each game page to purchase the song being played. Also, artists can approach JamLegend and get their songs into the game.
Thoughts
Let me preface this by saying, I am historically not a big gamer. I haven’t touched my Wii in months. These days I feel like I’d rather be getting some work done than gaming. Naturally, this is a perfect fit for JamLegend. I don’t have to go to the living room and turn on a console. I don’t have to launch a full-screen game. I just have to create a new tab in the web browser I was already using and I can indulge in a no-commitment 4 minute game with ease.
The ability to create duels and easily compete with friends is a big aspect of JamLegend for me. The game is easy enough that I can tell a friend to sign up and we can start playing against each other within minutes. Case in point, I got my sister on JamLegend.
As for nitpicks, sometimes the graphics freeze for a second but the music and game are still going on in the background, causing me to miss a few notes. I attributed this to my MacBook Air and resource-intensive Flash but it also happened once when I introduced Skribit Co-Founder Calvin Yu to it on his MacBook Pro. Other than that, I’m just waiting on some more songs to get added to JamLegend.
JamLegend is currently in a closed beta. Andrew Lee of JamLegend has provided me with a metric ton of invites. The invite URL is in the first comment on this post.
Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.
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invite url: http://jamlegend.com/register/pstam
Thanks, the wife and I will check it out.
Thanks for the invite, mate!
They email you your password? Plain text password storage is lame.
thanks paul!
Epic game! After Tap Tap Revenge it seems these guitar emus will drain all my productivity and free time >D
Greetings from Greece,
Spyros
Thanks. Pretty neat game, great time-waster. I’m interested to see future developments. For it to become the next craze I think it would have to include more well known songs. Also, it doesn’t seem to actually stop the guitar part you’re ‘playing’ if you miss the notes, like Guitar Hero or Rock Band.
Thanks for the invite code, the site is a lot of fun. I immediately started spreading the word.
Thanks for the invite Stammy!
So much fun. Have you figured out how to get the Guitar Hero guitar working? Just need some software to remap its keys as 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.
That doesn’t necessarily mean they store it in plain text. Remember that as you’re setting it, they have access to it in plain text. If they fire off the e-mail right then, they don’t have to store it in plain text.
But yeah, probably not the best idea to e-mail someone a password they’ve chosen. It’s unnecessary.
Like you am not a biggamer, but will give it a go. May save me laying down the cash on Guitar Hero which I know I wouldn’t really play!!!!
There have been small flash guitar hero-esque games before (e.g. http://www.tenaciousd.com/devilmayfry ) and then of course there are the non browser based ones like Frets on Fire ( http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/ ) but hopefully this will combine the breadth of FoF with the accessibility of a browser.
Just in case you didn’t know it: Frets on Fire is a really nice open source GuitarHero-like game, that can actually import Guitar Hero songs.
Granted, it lacks all the 2.0iness of JamLegend, but it does run on Windows, MacOS X and GNU/Linux and is pretty much fun to play.
After playing with it some more, I would say that it plays a lot better on Safari than on Firefox, at least on Macs. The freezes are minimal if at all.
I think the best thing about Guitar Hero is that I can step away from sitting at my pc all day like I normally do. It gives me the ability to use a guitar like controller and I can rock out to some of my favorite jams with the tv blasting instead of an air guitar. I think sitting down and pressing keyboard keys is less entertaining and boring.
Try out Rock Band if you haven’t, that’s a bit more involved but very entertaining.
I’ll give it a shot :P
Sweet invite. Maybe they could use mouse movement entropy for a whammy bar?
Wow! I just found my new time wasting game!! I haven’t heard of any of the music, but it sounds good! I love games like this, extremely simple in concept, well executed!
Looks awesome and promising! Thanks for the invitation. Cheers
Thanks for the invite Paul. I have been hooked on this game and I challenged you to a duel. The showdown option is the best feature, but it is still very buggy, which of course they will fix with time. Great concept and a great game.
@Jenu – Haha yeah I saw your duel… I’m not that good. I’ll need some time to practice before I can complete it. :-P
“JamLegend is currently in a closed beta. Andrew Lee of JamLegend has provided me with a metric ton of invites. The invite URL is in the first comment on this post.”
F’ing brilliant. :)
A cute game at best but just another keyboard tapper that reminds me of Dance Dance Revolution on the PC. The networking bit though is interesting, global competition always makes things a bit more exciting.
Hey every one – Maze here (JamLegend Developer)
Be sure to check out JamLegend.8Forum.Net :)
the forum is unofficial.
Can one of u guys tell me if it’s best to have a low number or high number on your global ranking? I don’t really understand it