As someone who has an MP3 player full of chiptunes, this game immediately grabbed my interest. After doing a little digging around (there are only like... 3 youtube reviews; the game released today), I decided to take the plunge and purchase the game.

So what is it?

Chiptune Champion is a Guitar Hero clone that exclusively uses chiptunes for the tracks you play to. Being a kid from the 80s, the music definitely brought back memories of summer vacations spent on the NES and Gameboy. There's a wide selection of music to choose from the outset, and the ability to create your own tracks in the track editor or download tracks from the Steam Workshop gives this game the huge potential for massive replayability.

So that's the good part.

The bad part is the control scheme. What Chiptune Champion wants you to do is take your keyboard and hold it like a guitar. The 1-5 buttons are used for the "strings" while the enter and shift are used for the strum bar. Holy smokes is that unintuitive.
It took my wife asking me what I was doing to the keyboard to convince me to go down into the basement looking for one of my old Guitar Hero controllers. And surprisingly, it worked.
While there is no ability to use a guitar controller from inside the game, downloading a free program like JoyToKey will allow you to map the game's controls to the buttons on your guitar, making the control scheme infinitely better and nearly identical to playing Guitar Hero or Rockband.

So do I recommend the game? Yeah, but only if you have a guitar controller that is compatible with your PC. The game is pretty fun and the music is great. The controls could use a little work and hopefully the game will eventually support an in-game guitar control scheme instead of players needing to use a third party.

As someone who has an MP3 player full of chiptunes, this game immediately grabbed my interest. After doing a little digging around (there are only like... 3 youtube reviews; the game released today), I decided to take the plunge and purchase the game. So what is it? Chiptune Champion is a Guitar Hero clone that exclusively uses chiptunes for the tracks you play to. Being a kid from the 80s, the music definitely brought back memories of summer vacations spent on the NES and Gameboy. There's a wide selection of music to choose from the outset, and the ability to create your own tracks in the track editor or download tracks from the Steam Workshop gives this game the huge potential for massive replayability. So that's the good part. The bad part is the control scheme. What Chiptune Champion wants you to do is take your keyboard and hold it like a guitar. The 1-5 buttons are used for the "strings" while the enter and shift are used for the strum bar. Holy smokes is that unintuitive. It took my wife asking me what I was doing to the keyboard to convince me to go down into the basement looking for one of my old Guitar Hero controllers. And surprisingly, it worked. While there is no ability to use a guitar controller from inside the game, downloading a free program like JoyToKey will allow you to map the game's controls to the buttons on your guitar, making the control scheme infinitely better and nearly identical to playing Guitar Hero or Rockband. So do I recommend the game? Yeah, but only if you have a guitar controller that is compatible with your PC. The game is pretty fun and the music is great. The controls could use a little work and hopefully the game will eventually support an in-game guitar control scheme instead of players needing to use a third party.