Fret Nice
Don't fret.
Fret Nice's initially confusing guitar-solo combat is an unexpected highlight. Enemies have different numbers of eyes, mouths and antennae on their faces, and playing different notes on the guitar corresponds to these features. To defeat a four-eyed enemy with two antennae, for instance, you fly into the air in its vicinity and play the same note four times, then a different one twice. At its best it feels like a fast-paced puzzler, in that you can afford to fudge the features a little, but it reduces bonus points. It would, however, surely have made sense to use the universal language of colour-coding for the combat. Why not make the eyes green, the mouths red and the antennae yellow to make it easier to see how they correspond to the fret buttons?
Most of the time, due to the unbearable imprecision of the control system, the best that you can hope to do in Fret Nice is muddle through, but the game cripples itself further with a medals system that forces you to play through levels again and again for faster times and higher scores in order to unlock subsequent ones. This adds considerably to the frustration. If the game would just let you bumble incompetently through then it might compensate for the broken controls, but to demand speed, precision and high-scores just highlights the already obvious disconnect between the controller in your hands and what you're trying to achieve on-screen. Guitar Hero works precisely because it gives the illusion that you're playing a guitar. Fret Nice shatters this illusion by repurposing the thing as a conventional controller - a task to which it isn't remotely suited - which suggests a profound misunderstanding of why people enjoy playing with them.
There's an easy answer to all of this: just don't play it with a guitar controller. Then Fret Nice simply becomes a music-themed pattern-matching platform game with considerably more palatable controls. But the responsiveness and pace that are intrinsic to 2D platformers remain conspicuously absent, and the medal system is still unnecessarily repetitive. It's not unplayable, but there's so much wasted potential.
It's been a while since I've played a game that's made me really appreciate how essential a control system is. Make a game with controls that don't work, and lovable presentation and playful creativity can't save it. It always hurts to punish a game that tries something different, especially when such obvious care has gone into its presentation, but Fret Nice fails to execute its ideas with competence. With a guitar controller Fret Nice verges on unplayable; with a normal one, it feels like a waste of ideas. Either way, it isn't worth 1200 points.