Mike took a tour of some Mac game booths over in Moscone West. Check out a quick review of Tiger Woods Golf, Sims Pool and Sims Bowling for the iPod, making machinima using 'The Movies' (who'd a thunk it), a brief interlude with Aquaria, a true Guitar Hero (seriously, one of the world's best takes on the hardest song on the hardest setting), and a look at EVE Online, now available in PC, Linux and Mac. All this in less than 9 minutes.

The guys and gals over at our sister blog Engadget were keeping busy at the recent CES and have turned up some interesting products with a Mac angle. In the video above they're checking out a new music instruction software package called Guitar Wizard which works a lot like the Guitar Hero game (our coverage). The key difference is that Guitar Wizard uses a real guitar and actually teaches you something about playing. The kit consists of the software and a midi pickup which can be attached to your own guitar for $150, or you can get a kit that includes a guitar as well for $300. New songs will be downloadable at 99 cents each.

If you've never played Guitar Hero, you've been missing out. It's quite an experience - you play with a special guitar controller, and as notes fly towards you on the screen, you hit both fret buttons and a strum bar in time to real life rock music. I'm a huge fan of the series, having played the original on PS2, and Guitar Hero II on my Xbox 360. Now, Mac owners will can to take the stage: Aspyr Media has announced that they're bringing the series' third iteration to the Mac.

Guitar Hero III is scheduled to be released in October on the consoles and PC. Aspyr will release a hybrid Windows/Mac box, complete with USB guitar. System requirements haven't been released yet, but I'd expect any PC version to have everything the console versions do. The complete setlist contains pretty much any kind of rock you're interested in, from Rage to Bloc Party to Kiss, and even the D and gamer favorite DragonForce.

Sounds awesome. Considering the guitar is just a USB device, how cool would it be to integrate it with Garageband? Here's hoping Aspyr stays on beat, and makes the PC/Mac version available shortly after the console release. Until then, you may always rock it out with Frets on Fire. Throw the horns!

A while back we posted on the cool open source Guitar Hero clone, Frets on Fire. Well I'm a pretty big Xbox 360 fan, and one of my favorite games on the 360 is the recently released Guitar Hero II, which ships with a USB X-plorer guitar-shaped controller. So of course the first thing I did when I got it was plug it into my Mac to see if it would work with the Pref360 controller driver, but alas it did not. Disappointed, I contacted the author of that driver, Colin Munro, to see if he could help me get it working. And sure enough, with a little bit of editing of the driver plist, we got it going (that is to say, I followed his directions exactly and it worked).

I asked Colin if he would go ahead and add native support for the X-plorer for the next release of Pref360, and he has now done exactly that in the just released version 0.05. Furthermore, it works great with Frets on Fire (look here for the Mac version); just install Pref360 and then go into the Frets on Fire button setup and you should be able to assign the fret and strum buttons (the whammy bar is not yet supported in Frets on Fire). Now you have access access to all the fan created songs for Frets on Fire on your Mac.

Coincidentally, MacRecon recently reported that you could use the X-plorer with USB Overdrive ($20). However, Pref360 is donationware, and it works with Frets on Fire. So unless you have some other need for USB Overdrive I'd suggest going with Pref360, which is a free download from Tattiebogle.

Thanks gortman (mac recon)!

Update: fixed preposition. For those of you having trouble getting Frets on Fire to run, I would suggest trying out one of the older builds. Version 1.1.324 from back in November is running fine for me on an Intel Mac. Look here and scroll down.

Guitar Hero was a huge hit for the PlayStation 2 console. Using a special guitar shaped controller you could "play" a variety of rock hits, hitting the fret buttons in time to on-screen cues. Well now there's an Open Source cross platform clone of Guitar Hero called Frets on Fire which includes support for OS X. The program was originally designed to be played with a keyboard, but at least with the Windows version, you can use the actual Guitar Hero controller (along with a PlayStation 2 to USB adapter) to play Frets on Fire on the computer. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to determine if the controller also works with the Mac. So anybody out there "jamming" on the Mac with the Guitar controller?

[Edit: those of you having trouble on PPC check out this forum thread]

Thanks, Carlo.