This was posted by the creator on Harmony-Central. http://www.guitargames.net has some cool games that help you learn to read music, master the fretboard and some theory. Just thought I'd pass it on, it's been helping me.
I love the concept but um, most of those games are less fun or lack flexibility or a real guitar (so fail to teach much).
Squash: This is just annoying, identify note, wait for note to show up on a chuck e cheese style meatball/brownie/turd monster and click it. This just strikes me as an added layer of frustration that someone trying to learn the notes doesn't need.
Chord mines: This one has potential in the idea of learning chord shapes, unfortunately that's what it's teaching instead of chord notes. When it says G7 I should be able to pick out any voicing that is a G7, not just the first G7 most guitarists will learn. This wouldn't fit with the game as it's played really but the game itself wasn't that good anyway.
Key Finder: I just didn't enjoy this, I was hoping it wouldn't be extremely annoying as I don't know the key signatures very well, however, after trying this game I've decided to find a book and memorize it (or at least practice figuring out the circle of fifths in my head so that I can start from C and figure it out).
Fret tester: This is the closest thing I played on the site to being useful, this one really can help you learn to play notes from sheet music on the guitar, at least, help you know where to play them, it doesn't translate directly into being able to play but it should help someone learn to read and know where to play the note on the guitar. But yep, it has a flaw too and it's an easy to fix flaw, there is only one right answer for where to play any note, they display 12 frets, but only the first 4 count (the rest are 'out of bounds'). Editting in: Oops, noticed in options that you can set it to playing in other positions, but I still say that it should allow playing any A note that is the same pitch (there is only one right low E but for any other E there are plenty).
I hope whoever is working on that site keeps on trying, I think the idea of games you can play to teach guitar fundamentals is good, but so far mostly the games there just distract from learning anything. A more ideal game would be setup to take input from a real guitar, and translate the sounds it hears into games themselves. I've looked into this myself and I got so far as being able to figure out what note is being played but being able to pull apart an entire chord being played, and figure out the individual notes was beyond me. I don't know how practical it is for computers to break sound down in real time like that, the processing power of computers is pretty good these days but other than single notes it might be entirely too much work to do on the fly.
