Find content
Not Telling
Grabbed a copy of Rocksmith, rather decent game.
Its for learning guitar but I think it penalizes far to easily and doesn't reward fast enough. My main issue is with the PC version the track goes out of sync far too much since every time you boot it up you have a different amount of background programs running. Although you can change the latency in the options menu doing this every time gets a little stale. This is also the reason why the penalties are far too quick, since on any song I know off by heart all my missed notes are because it became latent and thought that I hit a note at a wrong time. Any song I am learning for the first time I can't tell if it was because of the latency issue or because I legitimately missed a note.
Apart from that I think it is quite good for people just learning but for anyone like me who is stuck between intermediate and advanced level guitar I suggest finding out if the latency issues go away on XBOX or PS3 versions of the game and giving those a try. Yes with about 20 min of tinkering you can get the latency issue to be very small but whatever... I don't like preparing a game I am about to play, I play something because I want to play it now.
The actual game! Basically it follows the same format as guitar hero in that you have a fretboard and notes slide down and when they reach the fretboard you play the note. It has many great songs to choose from and even some exercises to pump up your dexterity. I found the exercises were quite good esspecially for a player like myself who neglects a lot of scale and mode practice. On the whole after I learn a brand new song from scratch if I grab my electric and try to play the song by myself I find that I didn't commit the song to memory all that well. The game actually increases your ability to sight read tabs but not commit them to memory. If you are a beginner it will help with your speed, dexterity and sight reading but at the same time I think if you start as a new player then it will teach you many bad practices. It doesn't penalize you for unclean notes so you don't learn to pull off speedy clean notes and it doesn't teach you about correct hand positions which means you will develop a rather messy style. Lastly it doesn't care about your strumming and plucking patterns I played house of the rising sun 3 times just to test this out and blitzed it each time. One strumming just down strokes (bad form) one finger picking (good form) and last with a pick playing only down strokes (bad form) I was tempted to try alternate picking but decided I would blitz it doing that also.
So final thoughts, It will help a brand new player as long as they are getting lessons at the same time. It will speed up the learning time between beginner and intermediate play but after that it loses its usefulness as a tool to progress your guitar playing. I did find it a lot of fun though and since something I am focusing on at the moment is playing to background music it is handy in that my guitar part is omitted so I can hear how I contribute clearly.
Wondering if anyone had anymore thoughts on it or just wanted to know what its like. I haven't tried playing Bass on it yet but when I can be arsed to ask my friend if I can borrow hers I will let you know how that is if you want.
Yes it needs a real Guitar and/or Bass.
