I want a city builder with a Civ-like timeline. You start off building huts and farms and keep on going until you get space elevators and fusion power. I want to see roads go from footpaths to trails for horse drawn carriages to full on highways. I also like the idea that you could choose your starting period so it could be used as a standard city builder too.

As far as I know Clone Hero and YARG are the best options going now. They both support guitar/ bass, drums, and keyboard, although only YARG has vocals.

YARG is still in development but I haven’t had any problems with it. There’s also support to download venues, though I haven’t messed with it so I don’t know how well they work yet. I’m also guessing there will eventually be support for characters at some point, but I haven’t hear anything officially. They also release on Linux.

Clone Hero has a full release and the developers are still active. As far as I know there’s no venue support, although some people set the songs’ music videos to play in the background. It also looks like they only release on Windows.

Both of them come with a handful of songs, though you can download a ton more. They use the same files so you can have both pull from the same library if you want. I can’t remember where I found the links anymore, but I have the tracks for all of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero games that had a full band, plus other random songs I got from https://rhythmverse.co/ and https://www.enchor.us/ The songs for the Guitar Hero games that were just guitar and bass are out there too if you don’t care about drums, keyboards, or vocals.

As someone using Windows who decided to check out Visual Pinball after reading your post, I’ll agree it’s pretty fiddly. It seems like if you have the patients/ focus to get everything set up it’s really good, but if you just want to download and play something you’ll probably want to go with something else.