Rocksmith discussion thread - New real guitar game.

[Sargehalo51]

Rocksmith has been getting better DLC than Rock Band.

Now that Rocksmith has stopped all the Black Keys crap, I totally agree with you!

[Ralphy2009]

Rocksmith has been getting better DLC than Rock Band.

The songs revealed seem to be a Judas Priest Song Pack containing: Living After Midnight, Painkiller, and Breaking The Law. Additionally to Judas Priest there are three singles including: Foster The People (Pumped Up Kicks), Maroon 5 (This Love), and Evanescence (Bring Me To Life).

Sad, but true. What I wouldn't give to play Painkiller and Bring Me To Life in Rock Band. I'm sure Pumped Up Kicks will also never make it to Rock Band.

[Witticus]

Sad, but true. What I wouldn't give to play Painkiller and Bring Me To Life in Rock Band. I'm sure Pumped Up Kicks will also never make it to Rock Band.

Are you talking about for Pro instruments? Because all those songs are either coming or in Rock Band already.

[grumblevolcano]

I'm sure Pumped Up Kicks will also never make it to Rock Band.

Not true unless you're a Wii user. Pumped Up Kicks is on HMX's new game, Rock Band Blitz. Buying the game will AUTOMATICALLY export the tracks into RB3 as it is an XBLA/PSN game so it reads the game file as RB3 DLC.

[JBlack240]

Not true unless you're a Wii user. Pumped Up Kicks is on HMX's new game, Rock Band Blitz. Buying the game will AUTOMATICALLY export the tracks into RB3 as it is an XBLA/PSN game so it reads the game file as RB3 DLC.

You didn't catch the sarcasm I see.

[Chertenstein]

Judas Priest DLC just got even better relative to the RB offerings this week. I know we already have these in RB, but some are live and if I recall none had pro guitar.

[Witticus]

Judas Priest DLC just got even better relative to the RB offerings this week. I know we already have these in RB, but some are live and if I recall none had pro guitar.

Yeah, I'm not sure why there was a spree of giving us terrible Judas Priest live tracks for a while.

[Lowlander2]

They could be using Ogg Vorbis, which I've read Harmonix also uses.

Yep, they do. Something I learned from my FoF days.

[toymachineSH]

https://fbcdn-sphotos-a.akamaihd.net...16251075_n.jpg

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[tnevaker]

so i finally got around to playing this game last week. in short, some things were better than i thought they'd be, some unfortunately worse. the charting, which i expected to be bad going in, turns out it's even worse than i feared. if they just used this charting style with 2D graphics and a static fretboard, it would still be hard to read, but then you add in the 3D gimmickry and the zooming in and out on the fretboard, and it really gets difficult. the 3D stuff and the angles of the notes makes it very hard to tell which frets the notes are coming down on, and even though they are highlighted on the fretboard below, when the notes are coming at any kind of reasonable speed or frequency, it's too hard looking back and forth between the notes and the fretboard to figure it out. and then the zooming thing, which i thought looked kind of cool in videos, turns out not to be so good in practice. i'm playing this game on a 60" screen, from about 9-10' away, and still i have difficulty seeing the notes when it zooms out too far. i can only imagine how difficult it would be on a 32" or 42" screen. add on some graphical design and color choices that makes the fretboard and notes more difficult to see than necessary (i find the blue notes in particular sometimes blend in with the background when it's zoomed out) and these charts are much more difficult to read than they have to be. most of the songs i've played in this game so far have been pretty easy, relatively speaking, but even the single-note version of Satisfaction becomes pretty jumbled once you get to the "mastered" phrases, and that's mostly just 8th notes. i suppose i'll get more used to it with practice, but i'll never get completely used to it. my fears on the charting have been pretty much confirmed and worse.

my other major beef with the game is the riff repeater, and in particular, the inability to set your own speed to practice a phrase. the way the riff repeater makes you play the phrase and then "averages" your speed just makes no sense. you could have a phrase that you can play perfectly except for one small part, and it's that one small part you need to slow down, but because it's just one small part and you can pick through it, it doesn't bring your average speed down much, and then you have to play the whole phrase back at a much faster "average" speed then what you need. why can't you just pick a speed on your own? they let you pick a "mastery" level, after all? kind of defeats the advantage of having slower practice speeds than what RB allows, if you can never choose those speeds on your own. at least when the audio does slow down, it still sounds pretty good at those slower speeds.

the menus, while more cumbersome than necessary, aren't as bad as i thought they'd be from what everyone else said. probably helps that i never played it back when you only had 5 "lives" in riff repeater, i can only imagine how annoying that would be. the song selection screen could be better designed, it's ok for now, but if you get a lot of DLC it could get bothersome paging through it all.

my other major issue going in was the inability to choose your own difficulty levels and play the full chart right off the bat, but between the riff repeater ability to choose a starting level and level up individual phrases, and the terrible charting design that pretty much forces you to play at a simpler difficulty just to be able to read what you're supposed to play before increasing the note density, i end up not minding the levelling aspect. ironically, if the chart design of this game wasn't so terrible, the levelling might bother me more. the levelling does annoy me on those "technique challenges" where i have to replay each one at least once to get gold stars, because it starts off at too low of a level to gold-star it on your first pass (and the palm mute challenge is completely broken, i can't level it up at all, even though when i play a song with palm mutes it seems to work fine). the minigames are cute, but i don't see myself going back to those very often.

most importantly of all is that the note-tracking technology seems to work very well. i don't have any complaints about that, and just reinforces my opinion that this is how RB pro guitar should have been done. i get a bit of audio lag (from my system, not the game) which is distracting when noodling around on top of menus, but not as noticable when you've got a song playing behind you.

overall, it's a fun game, but the fun is mainly due to the fact that playing guitar is fun, not because the game itself is particularly fun. the game aspects, and especially the charting, are poorly designed, but it's still more fun to play than RB pro simply because i don't have to use a crappy squier that i can't bend strings on or hear what i'm playing. and being able to play along with Where Is My Mind alone was probably worth the price to me.