Rocksmith: An Outsider's Opinion

I mentioned recently that I have been playing Rocksmith for the Xbox.  I am enjoying myself immensely.  I am bothered, though, by the lack of helpful reviews of the game. Oh, there are a lot of reviews out there, all right, but none I saw seem to be written with you, the reader and potential buyer, in mind. 

This post clumsily attempts to fill that gap.  I hope it helps those of you who stumble upon this.

Some intro info so you don't waste too much of your time (this is kind of a long post):

I don't cover the gameplay much - that's been done by people who are good at it. Here, I give you my opinion on who will like this game or hate it. Also, I give my impression of the multi-player feature, my input on required guitar quality, and one possible solution for audio lag.

I am just one dude with an opinion that works for me.  I am not a game reviewer or a gamer.  As a matter of fact the word "gamer" badly bothers me on some indefinable level.  Maybe it's because the hard gutteral at the beginning and the "er" at the end try to make sitting on the couch to the exclusion of all else sound action-y, honorable, and something to be striven for.   Maybe I am just jealous.

I am not a musician and I would (at this time) go into a panic if you handed me an out-of-tune guitar and told me that my next meal depended on me tuning it by ear.  I listen to pretty much anything, but I am not a connoisseur of fine or even good music - even the most cursory glance at the Montage list in the sidebar demonstrates that. The fact I even allow some of these songs to live on my iPod should send up a number of red flags on my qualifications for you right there...

This is not a cheap game ($70 unbundled, $200 bundled with a guitar).  In addition, you may also be weighing your options for buying a separate, second-shelf-from-bottom electric guitar (like I did) sending your total cost well above $350.  That's a lot of scratch to shell out for an item that is purely for amusement.  Hell, that's a lot of scratch to shell out for anything that is a "want" versus a "need", really.

You may be considering getting this as a big Christmas gift for yourself or a loved one.  Maybe you have seen the commercials on TV and are intrigued by the possibility of learning guitar in what appears to be a fun way.  Should you commit to such a large expense, or will the game be played a few times and set aside the day Saints Row 3 or the new Madden comes out?

That, my friends, is strongly dependent on your personality type and what you expect from the game.

Think. Were you tricked into getting in shape by having a Wii Fit bundle or the P90X DVDs in your house?  Did those super expensive Rosetta Stone disks teach you Chinese with little effort on your part?  And let's not forget about the short-wave radio, the unicycle, and the karate outfit sitting in your closet.  Is having an unused guitar staring at you balefully from just to the left of the TV for months on end going to bum you out?

You may respond "But this is different" and give some perfectly valid reason for why it very well may be.  Maybe you have a love of music that overcomes the crippling inertia you have encountered when setting your sights on other far-reaching goals in the past. Only you can make that judgment, of course.

Learning guitar is hard.  Learning guitar is time-consuming.  Nothing in the world is going to change that and anyone who tells you otherwise, princess, is trying to sell you something.  The best you can hope for is that the learning curve has some pleasant scenery to look at while you are climbing it. 

Rocksmith does that well.  Extremely well.

Some reviewers who bill themselves as mainly musicians erroneously report that the goal of Rocksmith is purely to teach you how to play guitar and it does so badly.  The game doesn't make that claim.  It is, though, a very fun way to learn the fundamentals of guitar playing from a gaming standpoint.  Although it teaches things you, as a newbie, might not know, it is not a professional music teacher any more than a Lego kit based on Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater tries to be an instructor of architecture. 

Some people who review games professionally but lack music background are also harsh.  Not sure why.  Maybe they are pressed for time and can't really spend the hundreds of hours it would take to go “from zero to hero”.  Maybe they are stuck on Nirvana's In Bloom and, tired of practicing (or unwilling to practice with this weird new "controller"), complain overly much that everything is locked up and argue that you should have access to everything out of the box. Me, I don't care if stuff in this game is locked up or not.  I totally understand the complaints but I respect the game maker's rationale here. 

After all, golf is a skill-based game, too, and you would never consider playing the holes of a local course in some bizarre order or even skipping some because you don't like water hazards or sand traps.  If you want to do well, get your butt to the the driving range and hit a few buckets and see if that helps.  If you aren't willing to put in the time and effort, stick to metaphorically putting through windmills if the challenge upsets you so much.

That said, the songs are all unlocked in multi-player.  Multi-player game play is awesome.  It is great "jamming" with your buddy even though the two of you are at completely different skill levels.  Don't sweat the score.  Since the game (in single player, too) adjusts in real-time to your current ability notes and chords will appear and disappear as you do better or worse.  This means that lower skill players will have fewer and easier notes, palm mutes, bends, and chords to try and therefore fewer opportunities for scoring.  This is fair and is totally as life should be. 

I had a blast even though Jimmydunes routinely had three to five times the score I did.  If you are the type that pits yourself against someone who you know is way better than you at something and then cries "foul" when you do worse than them consider a different game.  Also consider therapy.

I imagine, though, that two equally matched people (guitar newbies or not) would have a really awesome time engaging in friendly competition liberally doused with a bunch of good-natured ribbing throughout.  I am looking forward to that immensely.

Regarding Lag

I run composite cables out of my Xbox because I once had audio issues a while ago when I tried to play Dirt with an HDMI hookup and never switched back because 1) I saw no need and 2) it is a real hassle to connect and disconnect stuff in back of the TV.   I go directly from the Xbox to the TV and I do not have a surround sound system.  I use the out-of-the-box lag number (50 ms) and I have not noticed any problems, but your ears are better than mine, I guarantee you that.

A slight lag was noticeable - even to me - with Jimmydune's setup (composite cable, optical audio from TV to sound system).  We played with the lag numbers but couldn't figure out what, if anything, we were actually doing.  The lag setup screen stupidly does not have a way of immediately testing the effects of changing the numbers.  This is bad in and of itself, but the description for how the lag adjustment works makes things very unclear as to what to expect when the numbers are changed. 

See if you can tell what the paragraph in the pic to the left is trying to imply. I can't figure out how to parse the paragraph to force it to make sense. How can a note appear earlier or later? Compared to what, exactly? No matter how many times I read those words I get a definite “bounce a graviton particle beam off the main deflector dish” vibe from them. We couldn't tell what, if anything, was happening when the numbers were adjusted.

After I left his place he played around some more with his setup and had this to say:

I am using the Component/Composite combo cable that came with the Xbox. The component cables (R-G-B) go into my TV, and the audio composite connectors (R-W) go directly into my external sound system. The yellow composite connector is not used. Lag is nonexistent and I never had to go back into the lag settings of the game to change anything. The only drawback, and I'll get over it soon, is that I have to unplug my optical cable from my audio system whenever I want to play Rocksmith and then plug it back in when I want to watch TV or use my PC. In the 21st century I shouldn't have to throw my back out leaning over the back of my entertainment systems multiple times a day, but whatever.. it is what it is. Most likely if I hadn't bought one of the cheaper Sony sound systems and splurged instead I'd probably have the option to leave them both connected and simply whisper towards my TV and it would switch gracefully between the connections.

Will Your Guitar Work?

What if you already have a guitar?  It says "plug in any guitar" so you should be able to do just that, right?  Well, probably. 

A long time ago Guitar Center was running a special on cheap Chinese-made electric guitars.  They only wanted $79 so Jimmydunes picked one up.  He knew it would be very low quality, but, for that price, he could beat on it and not feel guilty.

It turned out the single-pickup unit had a 60Hz hum that was pretty obvious.  Since I am told I know a little about electronics we opened it up and we were able to repair some shoddy wiring and filter out most of the hum, but the tone of the third and sixth strings predictably suffered a bit – tunable but kinda muddy sounding.  A few years later he bought a nice guitar for himself and he let me have the old one.  Fast forward to me trying to tune the thing using Rocksmith's built in tuner (after I tuned it outside of the game).  The third string would not be acknowledged unless I plucked it ridiculously hard and the sixth string simply would not register at all with the game.

So it seems that not ALL guitars will work - there is some minimum sound quality that is required for the game to function (which is why I now have two electric guitars in my house). This sounds like common sense but I mention this anyway because I am picturing well-meaning, generous-but-non-rich grand-folks inadvertently causing their equally non-rich grand-kids to be crushed Christmas morning because of this "gotcha".  The rich ones will manage.  Somehow, they will manage...

My new guitar is pictured here, slightly to the left of the television where I hope it lives only sometimes.

I would like to close with a pseudo-serious chart that you can use to determine if you and this game are a good match. Again, this is just my opinion.

The x-axis is your estimation, on a scale of one to ten, of how important guitar playing is to you.  A low score means you lack both ability and interest required to play the guitar someday in the future.  A high score does NOT mean you are (or think you are) Jimi Hendrix or Steve Vai.  Remember: this is NOT a measure of actual ability. A high score just means that you would rather play guitar to the exclusion of all other hobbies. A middle score is if you can picture yourself someday strumming a guitar around a campfire with family and friends.

The y-axis measures your "gamer-ness" or how seriously you take playing video games.  Again, this is not a measure of actual ability.  At the low end you really don't like or want entertainment in electronic game form.  At the high end you would rather play video games than do anything else. A middle of the road score is for people who enjoy video games occasionally.  They are "fine" with them and possibly even play up to a couple hours a day but have other hobbies as well.

If you score at the extremes you will probably not like this game because your expectations will not match what the game is designed to provide. As a hard-core gamer, you will probably feel it is too much of a learning tool and so it might not be “fun enough” for you. For you music nuts looking for a dedicated music learning tool, it might be too robotic or game-like and not take the whole guitar thing seriously enough for you.

But if you, like most folks, are in the fuzzy green area in the middle I think you are in for a treat. Like I said, I am not a musician or a gamer. I am hard-pressed to picture Future Me as either of those things. I might be both or neither. Who knows? But one thing is certain... I am looking forward to stomping the living hell out of Jimmydunes in multi-player someday in the not-so-unthinkably-distant future.

I am thinking something by The Black Keys.

How's that for a gauntlet, bro?