Rocksmith (360)

Here's my little review of Rocksmith on the Xbox360.

I am not an Xbox gamer, and up to this point have really only used the device for media streaming from my PC. I don't pay for XBL Gold membership (that's an entire other rant for another day), but have been a long time gamer on the Wii, and Nintendo family of consoles. I'm brand loyal that way:) A few years ago, I started playing Guitar Hero (first with GH2 on a friend's Xbox) and quickly became addicted to the gameplay, and the great music. Of course, that grew into GH3, and then Rockband. I prefer the gameplay of the Guitar Hero franchises, but can't deny that Rockband was a more polished front face, and definitely won the DLC race.

About 18 months ago, I was taking private guitar lessons and eventually bought my own guitar (Ibanez ART-100 in Black) but just didn't stick with it. The practice became a chore, and eventually as the GH franchise died (or at least fell into a Coma) my interest in genre faded as well. Then this little game called Rocksmith started to get some press last year, and the idea of plugging my own guitar into the Xbox, and learning to actually play the songs properly, while still getting scores, and the feedback that a game gives you intrigued me. I had heard horrible things about Rockband 3's attempts to bring real guitar training into the game, with their attempts to connect better fake guitars, or even 'real' guitars that you had to buy, but this was my own guitar, and the early feedback was that it actually worked.

Enough of the background, on to Rocksmith.

The presentation of the game is pretty nice, and relatively easy to navigate if not a little non-standard in how you get back and forth to the main menu. The 'Main Menu' is not the default screen, your progress/career screen is. For the most part, I can see how that is useful, but it still strikes me as a little odd.

The guitar functionality is very impressive, and easy. I do have a STRONG recommendation though. I was initially running my audio/video through HDMI to my television, and while Rocksmith recommended doing analog audio to my receiver instead of running it through the TV, I didn't give it any attention. I played for a few days, and found just the slightest bit of lag. It's kind of like when you clap your hands in a hallway, after hitting a note, you hear it just a split second later, like an echo. This lag disappeared completely when I went out and bought an analog audio cable to run from my xbox to my amp/receiver. Invest the $30 into the cable if you don't have one already if you're playing any music games.

The game UI is nice, and unobtrusive while playing songs, even a little TOO unobtrusive at times. on the left and right sides of the game UI, you get notices of "Streak 25", or "Perfect", but they're a little hard to read while playing, and so sometimes I miss them. That itself is more than likely very intentional by the game designers, and I'm not exactly complaining about not being able to read words while I'm trying to learn to play guitar at the same time:)

The number of songs included in the game is impressive, and has a pretty good mix of older classic songs, a few hits from the 90s/2000s, and some new artists. You start off with The Rolling Stones - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction, and Next Girl by The Black Keys. Neither of which are bands that I really enjoy, but the songs are songs I know when I hear them, and are great songs to start learning with.

So, am I learning? Yes, and that has been the biggest change for me. When I played games like Guitar Hero, and Rockband, I could play a song on a specific difficulty, until I had mastered it, bit up some confidence, showed off for friends and family and generally feeling good. Then I moved to a higher difficulty when I was comfortable. Rocksmith takes that comfort and throws it out the window. This game is challenging!

Let me repeat that...As someone who is essentially learning from scratch with only a couple months of private guitar lessons learning scales/and fundamentals, THIS GAME IS CHALLENGING. I'm not saying it's hard though, it simply challenges you. The game starts off giving you a single note every few seconds, and lets you establish yourself. The moment you start performing well though, it dynamically increases the difficulty. It never lets you really settle into a comfort zone, and pushes you at every step along the way. This is an amazing learning tool, but it can be intimidating when you start seeing notes/chords you haven't seen before coming at you. In the end, you're only getting them, because you're succeeding at what it's already given you. These small steps in increasing the difficulty make so much sense, and I have faith that it will help me learn and improve better than having set levels of Easy, Medium, Hard, Insane.

However, I have needed to re-learn a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction based on NOT getting 100% in my accuracy, or not easily surpassing previous high scores. Every time I play Satisfaction, my percentage accuracy goes up 1 or 2%, and so it's smaller victories, and not that instant gratification that I'm used to in the music game genre. You know, where you get 5 stars on a song the first time you've ever played it.

I mentioned a career mode, and it's nothing gimmicky like going from town to town, getting tour busses, or anything like that. It's about practicing a couple songs until the game says you're good enough to perform in front of a crowd, and if you do well enough, you get an encore song, that you may never have played before. It's this career mode that has me a little confused, and it may be based on my prior experience of mastering songs before moving to others.

Right now, I'm on my 3rd or 4th venue, and so my 3 or 4th set of different songs. The game is recommending that I practice and perform these songs, but my head says that I should be staying with the couple of songs that I have now, before I resume my progression in learning new songs. So I'm essentially fight against the game, moving to the Practice song options, and staying with that, because I'm worried about the problem of having too many songs kind of OK, but not actually being able to play any of them completely. If you have insight, suggestions, or experience with this, please let me know.

I haven't even touched on the other parts of the game, like the Guitarcade, which is a collection on minigames to help you with chord memorization/recognition, fretting, and other techniques. There is also a full suite of amp/pedal/effects for the guitar which you can customize and play around with for hours. I'm not even close to that stage yet, but for all intents and purposes, this game and your xbox become your guitar amp, and you can just play in the sandbox while ignoring the songs themselves.

Over all, the game has been very enjoyable, and while it will never get the hype/explosive growth that GH and RB experienced, I think that will be better in the long run. Better to have a strong product that does it's job well, then try to meet unrealistic sales goals year after year based on 1 year of fad culture. If you have an electric (or accoustic electric) guitar, and want to learn to play it and have been struggling to learn, this may be the answer for you. I hope it is for me.