Rocksmith

[Tokzic]

HEY RHYTHM GAME NERDS

YEAH YOU LIKE RHYTHM GAMES DON'T LIE TO ME I SAW YOU PLAYING THAT ARROW GAME A LITTLE WHILE BACK

what if i told you that you could use that same hand-eye coordination to (gasp) actually do something that adds to your life skillset

ENTER THIS GAME

What the fuck is it?

Rocksmith is a game with 60ish preloaded guitar tabs on it. It comes with a cable that lets you connect any electric guitar (yes, even the cheap one rotting in your basement) to a console through USB. You then use the guitar to play the tabs, and the game judges you based on each thing you hit, much like Rock Band and such. And more importantly, it is fucking amazing. Let me tell you why.

1) The soundtrack is awesome.

All the songs are fun to play on guitar. There is a good range of technique and genre showcasing, with almost every song being pretty fun, even the easy ones.

2) It doubles as an amp.

Complete with tons of effects. Which actually takes a ton of the cost out of buying an amp if you actually want to try learning guitar. And, y'know, pedals.

3) It's highly polished.

Every little detail is really well done. The art is amazing, the way the camera zooms around the fretboard is natural and easy to pick up on. There's cute little arcade games that use the guitar and focus on improving specific techniques.

4) It actually works.

No, I'm serious. The game detects damn near all the important guitar-related techniques, including chords, sustains, palm muting, slides, hammer-ons/pull-offs, harmonics, and even other shit, and if you don't play it exactly right, the game doesn't judge you well.

But not all at once, of course. Instead of making you pick difficulties and struggle transitioning between them, the game starts you out with an ultra-simplified version of every riff, and as you accumulate more skill and experience, slowly adds more complexity to each of them, in real time, reflecting how well you're handling each riff individually but also compensating for your overall skill development. This means if you mess up a series of notes in a riff, it will consider you overwhelmed and dial back the difficulty of that riff - if you catch it again it will scale you up, but if you continue to struggle that becomes the new default difficulty of that riff. The game always guesses how much you can handle and adjusts if it's wrong. And if that doesn't sound fast enough for you, you can load up a riff and repeat it, levelling it up until you master it or give up.

I find the effect it has on you as a player is that you enjoy being able to play along with the song, but you want to play exactly what the real guitarist is playing. And that makes you try harder, which makes the game harder, which in turn makes you try harder again. The result is that you get really good, really fast. I play every other day or so and I notice a difference in my skill every time I sit down.