toblix

Rocksmith

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I've been "playing" this one for the past few months and it's been very very helpful (I'm using a cheap fender squire). I have 3 big issues with this game though:

1. it doesn't have any songs I like (can't blame the game for that though)

2. loading times are brutal - and you're forced to reload if you want to retry. I might grab the PC version if its loading time are better.

3. adaptive difficulty does more harm than good. I rely mostly on muscle memory and the fact that a few mistakes can drop difficulty level mid-song just throws me off.

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2. loading times are brutal - and you're forced to reload if you want to retry. I might grab the PC version if its loading time are better.

The load times on the pc demo weren't that fantastic either. It's been a couple of days since I've played around with it, but I thought the pick-ups were live during the loading screens and you could just noodle around while the next song loaded up.

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So I finally managed to get a copy of this. Amazon decided that it was too hard to actually ship me a game, but eventually the Steam sale meant that buying a cable separately and just paying the $14 or whatever for the game on Steam was cheaper than finding a bundle somewhere. Spent two hours tonight messing around with it, and I totally love this thing. It's really cool how it gradually scales up the songs, and I've had a great time quickly getting up to a difficulty level that suits me. My guitar playing has been mostly rhythm guitar and chord focused, so learning lead parts is going to be weird for me, but I've had a lot of fun with the 10-ish songs the game has given me so far. Something that I'm quickly noticing however is that it's not going to do much for my picking technique. Playing "Go With The Flow" by Queens of the Stone age, I found that my arm was pretty much dying, so I tried to switch to alternate picking. Up-strums are nothing weird to me, being a dude what's played folk guitar stuff for a long time, but doing so on individual strings or pairs of strings rather than across all 6 at once is a level of precision I've never had to deal with from my right hand. I just don't have that skill yet, and developing it is going to have to be a priority for me if I don't want to keep dropping notes and losing my rhythm on songs like that.

Still, it's super fun. I bought the "Cliffs of Dover" DLC for $3 in a fit of optimism to give myself something to one day shoot for. I fully intend to keep up with this as much as possible. After returning to guitar last summer from a 5-ish year hiatus, this year's one and only resolution is to not let that slip away again. I'd started to get a bit tired of just learning different progressions for the same chords (though it's still lots of fun to have sing-along-y things just strumming away) but was intimidated by looking up harder stuff. After two hours, this feels like exactly the middle ground I needed. So fun, really helpful, and feels way more natural than I thought it would. My girlfriend has been thinking about taking her dad up on his offer of an old bass, and I'm considering picking up a second cable so that we can learn a couple of songs together.

'blix! I saw from the fact that you're the only person on my friends list with the game that you had put about an hour and a half into the game months ago and then gave up quickly. If you've already made the investment, try and pick it up again. It really is an awesome little thing from what I've seen. I'm really excited to see where this all goes. Major props to Ubisoft for making this thing real, that cable just feels like magic.

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The one thing this game is lacking for me is a real 'practice fundamentals' mode, preferably even explaining the theory. The minigames seem to have this as goal, but their ancillary bullshit just distracts me. Aside from that I love this game; also picked it up during the Steam sale. It loads pretty quickly from an SSD so no complaints there.

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Yeah, I didn't address loading times, but it doesn't seem like an issue on PC. My laptop loads a song faster than my 360 loads a Rock Band track, so it's fine for me.

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Hey guys, this game is still pretty sweet. I've been on and off with it, but this past week have started getting back in. I'm finding the DLC is a great way to keep motivated, as the songs that the game is suggesting to me aren't often/always my bag. That said, I never would have known who Dan Auerbach is without this game, and I find I quite like his stuff. As for things like picking technique, that I was concerned about way back in January when I posted in this thread last, I find the game actually is helping me with this. Not overtly, but the fact that to keep up with what the difficulty is starting to give me I have to find a way to pick effectively is actually causing me to do so. I'm getting some dexterity that I just didn't have before, and that's awesome. Again, if you own this game, keep playing it. I am now nearly halfway through the year, and rather than give up on my resolution, I can actually see myself improving a good deal. Neat!

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I bought this for my wife a year ago, after the first few months it sadly went unused. She's still working on the guitar playing in a band with some of her college friends, so I guess that's good at least.

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It's 7.50 on Steam for the next 12 hours. If you have a way to get a cable, you should still play this. I just keep on putting more time in, and even when I'm just fooling around playing chord progressions on my acoustic guitar, I can't help occasionally playing through a song that I learned in this game between others. It's really good, guys. I swear. It appears no one else cares though, so unless the thread picks up I'll shut up after this post.

 

 

...until Rocksmith 2014 comes out, anyway.

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There's also apparently some ini file "fixes" you can make so that you don't have to use the Ubisoft cable. I can't vouch for the method's validity or quality, as I haven't used it myself, but just wanted to throw that out there if it's something that's holding you back from buying the game.

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I doubt it's that nobody cares, there's just not much to say about this game except that it's awesome (with some annoying menu glitches).

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I don't think I've ever practiced guitar as much as I've been doing since I got this game. My fingertips are blistery and disgusting.

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I just had to bring back this thread to say that I just passed 72 hours of game time in the steam tracking for this game. I am proud of myself.

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I just had to bring back this thread to say that I just passed 72 hours of game time in the steam tracking for this game. I am proud of myself.

 

Well done sir! I take it you've reached rock star status and are getting invited to coke and sex parties now?

 

I apologize for sounding like an ass if the reference is lost.

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I'm afraid that the reference is indeed lost. You still don't sound too much like an ass though. 72 hours in a computer game that is basically assisted guitar practice is a silly thing to be proud of and I accept that. Still, I'm happy that I've stuck to things enough this year that I'm still playing guitar so long after having started despite life being very full, and I am able to notice a good deal of improvement in basic skills that I attribute to this game, so pride exists.

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Seriously though that is awesome considering it is much more of a learning tool than any of the other rhythm games. I would be proud too. And the reference was to the South Park episode about Guitar Hero from several years back. It is one of the truly great episodes of that show.

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2014 is out! I'm launching it for the first time right now!

 

 

 

 

 

 

...those fuckers added uPlay to it!

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Ok, a couple of hours later...

 

 

This is worth dealing with uPlay. As much as I love Rocksmith (about 90 hours invested at this point) I was always infuriated by how mind bogglingly bad the menu design was. They fixed the hell out of that thing, letting you just tab through the way that the songs are sorted. You've got all the usual, difficulty, artist, title, decade, etc. Notably absent is genre, which is a bit of a bummer, but oh well. One category that they do have that is awesome is "recommends" which pulls tracks that are similar to other songs that you've played a lot, either in terms of difficulty or song. I like that it tracks that and can pull some new ideas. Also of note is just how much more accurate everything feels. I could get away with some pretty sloppy play in Rocksmith, but not any more. The cable is exactly the same cable, but the optimizations that they've made to the software really make it feel way better. Also, you don't need to tune before every song, but you're free to if you're feeling like you need to. I do kind of miss the randomly generated sets from Rocksmith, and I spent a bit of time looking around 2014 for those, but they seem to have disappeared. I found that those were a really good way to keep me on my toes and keep me trying songs that I otherwise would have given up on for one reason or another (ie: "A More Perfect Union", which is a song I don't really like but practicing it to get it off of my setlist menu actually made me way better at pull offs).

 

In terms of songs, there's some good stuff in there if you have the same tastes as me. Also, all my DLC from the first game has carried over, which is awesome. When I booted up the game it told me to go to the store and buy the "transfer" DLC to get all the Rocksmith one songs over into 2014 as well, which is a bit of a bummer in terms of having to pay, but that's how it worked in Rock Band as well so I can't really hold it against them. What DOES suck is that when I tried to do this, the DLC didn't seem to exist on their store. It'd be nice if I could move those songs over, 'cause I really liked a few of those as well. Hopefully they put up that DLC stuff in the next week or so and I'll be able to straighten that out.

 

Overall, I fucking love Rocksmith and the interface improvements alone have sold me. I'm stoked as hell to keep rolling on this game, and now that I have a proper job I'm thinking of buying a bass as well. This shit is sweet, y'all. Get on it.

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My wife has been playing the Xbox version of the first one on and off, but has been having a really hard time picking up the chords the way the game was teaching. Has the actual training stuff improved at all?

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Not so much in the actual tutorials (though the amount of techniques has definitely increased by a tonne), but there are a lot of nice little things in the game that make learning a bit easier. For example, when there's a time that you have a chord made but just pick the individual strings in different patterns, it has a "ghost" of the chord at the start of that section to let you know how to place your fingers before you start. In the first game, there was just a lot of notes coming at you really fast and if you weren't thinking about it, it was way too easy to not realize that it was a chord and freak out trying to figure out how to finger the section. There is also a convenient "chord book" that will just straight up show you how to make a chord if you don't know. Like in the first game, there's always a "recommends" section, but this time it's per song. This means that the game will recognize if there's a chord you've never seen before coming up in this song and one of the recommendations will just be "yo, you should check the chord book for this one before starting" and provide you with an option to jump straight to that chord in the book. It's pretty handy.

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Ok, so I lied. The training is actually much better. Rather than just video with small bits of playing in a song at the end, it stops frequently to make sure that you're keeping up, and even does riff repeater stuff if you're not getting it. It also has about 5 million different topics covered in the tutorials menu. I tried playing a song tonight that had two hand tapping, for example, which is not something I'd ever tried before. After about 20 minutes in the tutorial stuff, I would say that I feel like I have the foundation to actually figure this shit out. It made me do repeated series of hammer-ons and pull-offs using the middle finger of my pick hand to hammer the high E note while I did hammer ons and pull offs from the high A and C lower down on the string. At the very least, it taught me the fundamentals of something that I'd never even considered trying before at my skill level. Cool stuff.

 

I'll shut up unless people have more questions, but god damn. This is fucking fantastic. I LOVED Rocksmith so so so much, and this improves on everything that I could have asked for. I haven't even tried the guitarcade stuff yet, but from what I've heard it's actually a way better skill trainer this time around than it was last time as well, so I'm completely sold. If you have the equipment and are even a little bit interested, you've gotta check this thing out.

 

Also, it doesn't seem like this one is built on Gamebryo, which the first Rocksmith was and loved to crash on my laptop. From the time I've spent, this feels a lot more stable, so take that for whatever it's worth. You guys: This shit. It's awesome. So rad.

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