Rocksmith
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I was pretty skeptical of this early on but reading a and watching a lot of reviews done by people with hands on experience it seems like a pretty impressive tool.
the what it tabs out the charts will take some getting used to, but awesome it works with your own guitar, and awesome it utilizes bends and such,
i have the rockband mustang for pro mode, and i'm pretty good with useing it and its a good learning tool, but if rocksmith works well it should even be better, even better than rb3 with the squire, since you actualy hear what you play, and not just trigger a audio sample of the original guitar track. the squire is expensive, i've been wanting one for a while but always other things to spend 300 bucks on. rocksmith is 80 bucks for game, and only 200 with a guitar, thats a steal.
i'll be preordering this i believe.
one thing i was concerned about is latency since you are playing your guit, then it goes to xbox, gets fx added then played back . I've had problems with rock band vocals having about a half second delay before i hear what i sing, and it makes it almost unplayable unless you turn down the volume of the mic. but after some research i found that if you dont use hdmi and run the rca audio plugs from the xbox component cables straight into your audio system and not your tv you can eliminate almost all latency for vocals, and i've read this also works for rocksmith,.
the what it tabs out the charts will take some getting used to, but awesome it works with your own guitar, and awesome it utilizes bends and such,
i have the rockband mustang for pro mode, and i'm pretty good with useing it and its a good learning tool, but if rocksmith works well it should even be better, even better than rb3 with the squire, since you actualy hear what you play, and not just trigger a audio sample of the original guitar track. the squire is expensive, i've been wanting one for a while but always other things to spend 300 bucks on. rocksmith is 80 bucks for game, and only 200 with a guitar, thats a steal.
i'll be preordering this i believe.
one thing i was concerned about is latency since you are playing your guit, then it goes to xbox, gets fx added then played back . I've had problems with rock band vocals having about a half second delay before i hear what i sing, and it makes it almost unplayable unless you turn down the volume of the mic. but after some research i found that if you dont use hdmi and run the rca audio plugs from the xbox component cables straight into your audio system and not your tv you can eliminate almost all latency for vocals, and i've read this also works for rocksmith,.
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By the way, If you want a guitar, you're going to want to spend more than $200-$300 on one. Those guitars are junk. I have a BC Rich Warlock with EMG pickups (81/85 setup) that I paid $800 for and it plays very nicely. Don't get a guitar just to play the game, get one because you want to play the guitar.
tho with gettin the epiphone i would recomend getting luthier to do a set up on it if you are not comfortable with making neck and bridge adjustments, it will cost about 50-70 bucks and make your guitar play sooo much better, i still take my guitar in once a year to get a pro set up done to it.
I definitely want to get this game, I've been dying for a music game that lets you play a real guitar. I hope they include tools to add music of your own (use tracks you own and write up the notation yourself), but copyright and licensing BS will probably make that impossible or they will probably want to sell you DLC to add more songs, even though they're probably not what most guitar enthusiasts want to play.
http://youtu.be/RuFEiVGKxSA
boo on no embed
I was really skeptical of the sideways note highway, but it seemed pretty natural right away, especially for chords. Mini games are nice and helps you practice fundamentals like bending palm muting and sliding. And the dynamic difficulty eases you into songs
couple of positive reviews:
http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/10/rocking-out-with-rocksmith-bring-your-own-guitar/
http://www.thegamingvault.com/2011/10/review-rocksmith-360ps3/
I read them and the kotaku ones. I get the impression kotaku viewed it as a game, and didn't rate it too high, the others viewed it as a teaching tool, and viewed it positively.
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/rocksmith/critic-reviews
meta critic is giving it good reviews, except joystick who seems to have also reviewed it as a "game"
especialy user reviewss 15 possitive and one neg.
i recomend it and a subscription to guitartricks.com which is the best guitar teaching site i've ever seen, guitar tricks will teach you foundation and form, and rocksmith will give you a lot of fun practice.
mostly the UI, they seem to love loading screens and you find yourself having to sit at a lot of loading and menu screens and game saves. like for mini
i took my first real stab at the mini games last nite, so far i've
unlocked dawn of the chorded, a game where you play chords to shoot zombies, and i was pleased at its large variety of chords especialy chords i've never bothered to master because they were dificult. "open f.. fuck that chord" but i found myself after a while playing them pretty clean.
also did the baseball game where you hit the right note as the pitch is coming in, a lot of them have bends, and you have to bend to the right pitch in the right time or strike out, i've always been weak at bends and can only do this a short time before my fingers are screaming. cant wait to see how far i can progress in this one.
theres one for fret memory where you just play on the right fret to shoot ducks it starts of real easy but soon is flying all over and you have no time to look at the guitar, you just have to learn to know where your hand is at all times, this is one that i noticed making a good improvement in.
last is harmonicaly challenged kind like simon says for harmonics disguised as difusing a bomb, the bomb plays several harmonics then you repeat, after a while it gets hard. i did not like this one nearly as much cause it turns to be way more of a memory game than a guitar game. and harmonics while used in music are not nearly as usefull as some of the other things taught.
i was skeptical of the mini games at first, but after last nite i'm hooked, its great seeing your score go up as you practice, a visible sign of "i'm getting this!" also as you score in the mini games goes up you can see names of people on the leader boards so you can try and pass them.. i've not come remotely close yet
as i'm typing this my fingers are aching from all the rocking i've done.
so my final review
Graphics C . all the stuff you need is here but if you are judging it as a "game" you may find it to be a bit off, the crowds are greenscreend people and a crowd of 100 may be five different greenscreen people repeated over and over playing some jerky animation, also weirdly there scale is off, i had a lady in the back of a crowd last nite whos head was nearly the size of the torso of the guy in front of her. but in the end the only thing that mattters is the guitar neck, the note highway, and that all is fine.
Fun: as a guitar player A+ i cant imagine a better way to practice
as a gamer D theres not much in the way of traditional game here, not character creation, story progression cutscreens, you can unlock guitar models, but i dont even know where you see them in game, i feel as a gamer with no prior or current interest in learning to play guitar you would quickly be frustrated.
Sound: B while there may be a small amount of lag its so small that i cant notice. but the weird thing is, after you play the song they do a replay of you playing during the menu. and the sound is off sync in this replay so everything sounds terribly out of time, i usualy just skip right thru this.
Some might argue that you are now required to buy an even more expensive instrument instead. But if you already have a guitar, this will definitely get you to dust it off and start learning to play it better.
does sound pretty fun tho. Does it have any harder mini games/drills if you want to work on your speed, or does it keep everything really simple for begginers?
It's beginner oriented, but after it figures out how good you are, it starts throwing more complex stuff at you. As you progress, it unlocks more minigames to help you develop those skills. It's definitely worth getting.
The tech in the game is impressive. It works surprisingly well I like the chord zombie game - it tests how quickly you can play random chords. I didn't like the scale race game and couldn't figure out how to do the bending baseball game.
My biggest problem with the game is that the way it illustrates the strings is the opposite of tabs. Tabs are as if you rotated your guitar towards your face with the lowest string on the bottom. In Rocksmith, its like an x-ray view of the guitar neck. I can tolerate this because I just memorized the colors they give for each string, but the chord diagrams make no sense to me because they're backwards and use the icons.
It teaches you how to play with the abstract rhythm game interface, which partially applies to real guitar. The mechanics are real, but anyone who learned to play using this would have no idea how to use tabs (it doesn't explain the difference).
The song list didn't excite me when I first read through it, but I enjoyed almost all of them in the game. The menus are kind of confusing. I've worked as a tester for a long time and yet I can't figure out how to navigate the menus.
Don't use a guitar with a floyd rose with this game. You have to switch to drop D at some points and the tuner probably wouldn't work.
I have a FR on my guitar, but I haven't played any songs with a drop D. I do have a fixed bridge on a guitar of mine, so all should be good. Best scenario: Use a drop D on one guitar and use E standard for the other.
The 'opposite of tab' thing was bothering me too but you can change it. There is an option to switch it to be the same as tabs. It still shows it like you're looking through the back of the neck so it looks kind of dumb but it'll be tab view.
Yeah, I discovered that yesterday. I think they should have found a way to make that the default setting and somehow oriented the art towards that configuration, because otherwise it could cause confusion.
with the base ball mini game.. took me a bit to figure out, at the top it shows you a fret number, at the bottom a string glows,, play that fret on that string when it counts down, theres a count when he pitches CLICK CLICK CLICK hit your note where the next click would be, sometimes you will see when looking at the string below it shows it bent, you have to bend the string to match the bend bellow
and my only regret witht he game is i've been working long hours and not able to play enough,, or i would play it forever.. as long as my fingers hold.
Haven't encountered anything hugely difficult so far, but I have to say, I really like the dynamic difficulty thing. Makes it really easy to learn from, even on a sight read. Maybe I haven't hit the hard songs yet, but I gotta think a lot of testing went into it when you can pick it up and get 80-90% on sight reads. Although... one downside to that is that if you do really well, it'll throw things at you that it hasn't taught you yet. I suck at chords, so I'll be hitting all the fast single notes, then it'll throw a bunch of 4 string chords at me at full speed. Yah, time to wait until it realizes I haven't hit anything for 10 seconds.
One thing to point out, this isn't really a game in the same sense that other rhythm games are. It's incredibly easy to cheat if you want to. The game can't tell the difference between muted notes and not (and tends not to pick up muted notes some the time it seems). It's timing window is huge so over-strumming and being off beat isn't that big of a problem either. But good fun, good learning, and the mini-games are really good for getting you to stop looking down when playing.
One problem I can see already is that once the game is turned off I cant really play any of the songs from start to finish yet even though according to the game I got 90% and more, its just not actually making me play the songs properly with all the notes and chords yet... so people might think they are awesome at guitar and then try playing without the game and be like "what the hell! I suck at guitar! I cant play this song properly at all!?" Prime reason for this problem is that often real bands have a rhythm guitarist and a lead guitarist and one does chords and the other does melodys and single note picking stuff, but this game tries to combine those 2 roles into one and that doesnt sound too good when you turn the game off and play it.
gotta go get a component cable tomorrow so that I can get rid of the lag