<color=blue>ROCKSMITH
Back in the mists of the 2005, Guitar Hero thrust miniature plastic facsimiles of real guitars into our hands and before long had the world rocking low rent Elvis Costello impersonations to covers of iconic guitar songs in our basements. Nearly seven years later, a veritable flood of music/rhythm games has left a bad taste in the mouths of many who (like me) helped crash that particular tidal wave, and as a result found themselves washed ashore distraught in a sea of cheap plastic instruments. Thankfully, Ubisoft's Rocksmith is not at all unaware of the shattered genre it's set out to stake a claim in, and has proposed something quite novel indeed: throw out your toy guitar controllers, and invest in the real deal.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3467/5832216424_df9b1755f4.jpg
Rocksmith is not a guitar simulator, but rather an "authentic guitar game" (according to its billing). It's cover art prominently features an Epiphone Les Paul - a junior version of which will actually accompany the game if you're willing to drop $200CND - and claims that you can plug in any real guitar (purely acoustic ones notwithstanding) and learn to play it through its skill adaptive gameplay. This is quite a lofty promise, and Rocksmith actually delivers...
Mostly...
Kind of.
Before I go any further, I feel it's important that I offer a few words on my own history with the guitar. Hopefully this lends my opinion at least a smidgen of credibility and explains from where I'm approaching the game and how I'm attempting to understand its aims and whether or not it succeeds at them.
I've been playing guitar, on and off, since 2003. I entered my high school's concert band playing the double bass in 2005, played lead guitar for our drama department's run of the musical Footloose in 2008, and somewhere along the line developed an interest in classical guitar. I had originally planned to attend the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, but missing all the audition and application deadlines forced me to choose something else instead. However now that I'm finishing up my undergraduate studies and finding myself with more free time, I've been getting back into music. I've recently been ploughing through classical guitar repertoire and study books, and I'm now at Royal Conservatory of Music grade 5 (of 8 grades) which I believe qualifies me as a late intermediate/early advanced guitarist. I am also now the proud owner of a ukulele, which keeps my fingers productively busy in between rounds of Team Fortress 2.
In short, I do in fact know my way around a guitar. As a result, I must admit that Rocksmith doesn't have much to offer me, at least as far as an educational experience is concerned.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised and I confess to approaching Rocksmith mostly expecting a novelty experience. But what might an entirely new player get out of it, a person who has never touched any musical instrument, let alone the guitar? Is Rocksmith actually a viable introduction to learning to play it? While I can't say for certain (as I've said, Rocksmith didn't teach me anything and I did not have the perverse pleasure of watching someone else learn from it as an experiment), I'm tentatively inclined to believe that it can.
http://jaykauffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Andr%C3%A9s-Segovia-Gold-Collection.jpg
At its core, Rocksmith is exactly like the Guitar Heroes and Rock Bands we all know and love (or loathe, depending on your saturation level). The game puts an instrument in your hands, plays a popular song you probably recognize and perhaps already enjoy, and prompts you to mimic the guitar tracks with various well timed fingerings and strums to a steady stream of notes. Only instead of five friendly buttons and a single protruding strum bar, you're in control of over 100 possible finger positions and six strings. Additionally, instead of four somewhat arbitrary difficulty settings, Rocksmith's difficulty is constantly changing based on how well you're doing. Play poorly and the game seamlessly scales back the complexity of the guitar line flying towards you. Play well and the the track gets more complex until you're actually performing the authentic guitar part.
This is all well and good at being a thoroughly impressive guitar simulator and cranking the original Guitar Hero gameplay up to 11, but we're not actually "learning" much yet. Fundamentally, this is still just mimicking the motions and gestures of a guitarist without knowing anything about it, much like how a budgie squawking a few disjointed English phrases isn't actually speaking English. What Rocksmith offers is an entirely physical learning experience, teaching you how to handle the instrument and how to get some pleasing sounds out of it, without the crucial cognitive component. Good for those who want to learn how to parrot its sixty-something setlist, bad for those who are curious about the musical mechanics behind fret 7 on the yellow string.
This particular deficiency is all the more disheartening not just because its presentation and utilization of guitar techniques is entirely superficial, but because I actually feel that Rocksmith has genuine potential to be an effective music teacher. For starters, its notation system is completely unique. The default display (although it can be inverted to a structural approximation of common guitar tablature), imagines that you're looking through the neck from behind and arranges the strings from lowest to highest from top to bottom: Low E = Red, A = Yellow, D = Blue, G = Orange, B = Green, High E = Purple. However aside from tuning the instrument, the real names of the notes are never understood, nor are they ever seen again except to indicate chord shapes which themselves are never fully explained.
The note highway itself is also constantly shifting to focus on the currently relevant section of the 20+ frets, which can make getting oriented a bit of a headache when instructions for each note feel twice as complicated as they need to be. First you have to figure out what string the note's colour indicates, then you have to determine what fret that note will be hovering over, a process I imagine is at least twice as difficult for complete newcomers who don't know a guitar intuitively and are always looking away from the screen to ensure their hands are doing what they're told. While I reckon it would make more practical sense to have each note indicate the fret number within itself (or how about even the option to list the actual note?), there are also a variety of symbols notes can contain to indicate techniques more advanced than just "pluck yellow string at fret 7." Xs are palm-mutes, arrows up and down are hammer-ons and pull-offs, curved lines are string bends, etc. Presumably this system of notation was deemed the simplest way to facilitate all the little tricks a guitar player can perform, but it still feels far from ideal.
http://www.cheatcc.com/imagesps3/rocksmith_00.jpg
Playing "High and Dry" by Radiohead
By and large, chords are handled in a similar way as notes, except that the names of the actual chords are (thankfully) shown along with the colour-fret matching notation. So if you already know an Em barre chord, you won't have to line up your fingers to the frets one at a time when you see that otherwise mysterious colourful shape flying towards you. Yet while this is indeed welcome and appreciated, it also exemplifies the dichotomy between learning how to play and mimicking what you see.
Chords (and scales, for that matter) are demonstrated but never explained. Rocksmith does not tell you that an Em chord is the notes E, G, and B played simultaneously, that an E chord is the notes E, G# and B, and that the difference between the two is the third interval of the E major scale changing a half-step. Rocksmith has videos demonstrating what three of the common guitar scales are, but neither shows you how to play them nor explains exactly what a scale is. Even something as basic as fret 7 on the yellow string being an E or fret 5 on the Low E string being an A - the same A as the open yellow string, in fact - is completely left out.
Now admittedly, this perhaps falls outside the purview of what Rocksmith is attempting to accomplish. After all, how much is knowing about music a factor in playing it? Many people speak without the slightest clue about grammar, and many people drive without even a vague idea about how their car actually works. Who's to say that a guitarist needs to know about theory and how it all works together? My problem is that this sort of knowledge, while not at all necessary, can only enrich the experience of playing guitar, and Rocksmith seems to have actively chosen not to include any of it.
http://gamer.portail.free.fr/mid/p356/newuploads_2012_0531_2f6423491fac5ee7d85a104f71e5ea70_120605_11ampst_dawn_of_the_chordead_screen_new-0001.jpg
In almost every other regard, Rocksmith is a remarkably comprehensive tool. Many songs have multiple arrangements highlighting either the lead guitar track, the rhythm guitar track, or a combination of the two. The progressively changing difficulty guarantees that the game is at least attempting to adjust itself to the needs of the player every step of the way. There are even entire suites of arcade style guitar mini-games and technique trainers, as well as a selection of brief videos on everything from changing guitar strings to advanced techniques like pinch harmonics and two hand tapping.
Certainly mixing music theory and a novel attempt at streamlining guitar notation from the very beginning would perhaps shift from daunting to outright alienating awfully fast, but I see no reason why these topics can't be handled in a menu kept out of sight for only the curious to find. Without it, Ubisoft has done a staggering amount of work for only half of the experience. Perhaps even less than half, since Rocksmith is essentially a solitary affair and sorely lacks the strong social component integral to giving music a soul. Frankly, it's extraordinarily hard to ignore the clinical feeling of Rocksmith when your instructor is a faceless voice (though presumably that's his body in the title cards and tutorial videos), your audience is a crowd of expressionless cutouts phasing in and out of existence, and your actions are merely the utmost glorification of colour matching exercises.
Regardless, I am inclined to be generous towards Rocksmith since it is ultimately functional and occasionally quite a bit of fun. From a gameplay perspective, the most glaring flaw is its gratuitous lag between what you hear and what you see. However as long as you're playing along to what you hear and not to what you see, it actually isn't terribly problematic and the game will not deduct some annoyingly arbitrary points for actually being more punctual than the game itself. After all, music is all about "feeling the groove," isn't it?
As for other quibbles, loading times certainly haven't got any less inconvenient over the years, Rocksmith has an often painful definition of what constitutes bending a string (hope your fingertips can handle <url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE9mM_ut62Y>"Good Enough" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), and indicating chord patterns more liberally would make certain single note phrases in certain songs far less intimidating. Aside from that, I'm hard pressed to think of any other criticisms that can't be chalked up to a matter of taste or the quality of the guitar being used to play the game. As for myself, getting comfortable to soft nylon strings makes the thick gauge of my Ibanez archtop rather painful during prolonged sessions, and the overall setlist is just kind of bleh as far as I'm concerned (though Ubisoft does sell new songs for the game every two weeks).
Yet for me, the most fascinating aspect of Rocksmith is, hands down, how it approaches the marriage of game mechanics and guitar instruction. Its very first lesson on how to play the guitar is a simple stream of notes that is soon rather appropriately revealed to be the main riff of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. There is no failing a song, only the increasing simplification of what you're expected to do as a penalty. And although they're often as superficial as guitar skins and amplifier tones, rewards come fast and frequently and serve as a sufficiently compelling reason to keep playing.
Indeed, if Rocksmith has learned anything from seven years of Guitar Hero and its ilk, it's that what truly made the genre explode was the immense feeling of gratification it offered to those who played such games. That same sort of positive reinforcement is present here, and is as good a form of encouragement as any to keep a person playing, only now it's being employed in service of a legitimate and admirable skill set beyond developing twitch reflexes.
http://ps2media.ign.com/ps2/image/article/743/743905/guitar-hero-ii-20061103053159088.jpg
Perhaps game designers don't make the best teachers, but they do via gamification know how to keep someone involved and interested. Thus when viewed as a complement to expert instruction, Rocksmith does have a lot of merit. Even if the guitar theory and knowledge I cherish is almost entirely ignored, the game certainly does nurture the finger strength and muscle memory involved in playing the instrument. So while I can't vouch for the instrument bundled in the $200CND version of the game, if you are interested in learning to play guitar, you've already got one lying around, and you dig its setlist, Rocksmith does have a lot to offer. But please, do invest in some real guitar lessons, too.
Developed and published by Ubisoft.
Released in October 2011 on Xbox 360 and PS3 in North America, and launching worldwide in late 2012, as well as on Microsoft Windows.
Reviewed on a dull summer day by Maet.
Back in the mists of the 2005, Guitar Hero thrust miniature plastic facsimiles of real guitars into our hands and before long had the world rocking low rent Elvis Costello impersonations to covers of iconic guitar songs in our basements. Nearly seven years later, a veritable flood of music/rhythm games has left a bad taste in the mouths of many who (like me) helped crash that particular tidal wave, and as a result found themselves washed ashore distraught in a sea of cheap plastic instruments. Thankfully, Ubisoft's Rocksmith is not at all unaware of the shattered genre it's set out to stake a claim in, and has proposed something quite novel indeed: throw out your toy guitar controllers, and invest in the real deal.
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3467/5832216424_df9b1755f4.jpg
Rocksmith is not a guitar simulator, but rather an "authentic guitar game" (according to its billing). It's cover art prominently features an Epiphone Les Paul - a junior version of which will actually accompany the game if you're willing to drop $200CND - and claims that you can plug in any real guitar (purely acoustic ones notwithstanding) and learn to play it through its skill adaptive gameplay. This is quite a lofty promise, and Rocksmith actually delivers...
Mostly...
Kind of.
Before I go any further, I feel it's important that I offer a few words on my own history with the guitar. Hopefully this lends my opinion at least a smidgen of credibility and explains from where I'm approaching the game and how I'm attempting to understand its aims and whether or not it succeeds at them.
I've been playing guitar, on and off, since 2003. I entered my high school's concert band playing the double bass in 2005, played lead guitar for our drama department's run of the musical Footloose in 2008, and somewhere along the line developed an interest in classical guitar. I had originally planned to attend the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, but missing all the audition and application deadlines forced me to choose something else instead. However now that I'm finishing up my undergraduate studies and finding myself with more free time, I've been getting back into music. I've recently been ploughing through classical guitar repertoire and study books, and I'm now at Royal Conservatory of Music grade 5 (of 8 grades) which I believe qualifies me as a late intermediate/early advanced guitarist. I am also now the proud owner of a ukulele, which keeps my fingers productively busy in between rounds of Team Fortress 2.
In short, I do in fact know my way around a guitar. As a result, I must admit that Rocksmith doesn't have much to offer me, at least as far as an educational experience is concerned.
Honestly, I'm not at all surprised and I confess to approaching Rocksmith mostly expecting a novelty experience. But what might an entirely new player get out of it, a person who has never touched any musical instrument, let alone the guitar? Is Rocksmith actually a viable introduction to learning to play it? While I can't say for certain (as I've said, Rocksmith didn't teach me anything and I did not have the perverse pleasure of watching someone else learn from it as an experiment), I'm tentatively inclined to believe that it can.
http://jaykauffman.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Andr%C3%A9s-Segovia-Gold-Collection.jpg
At its core, Rocksmith is exactly like the Guitar Heroes and Rock Bands we all know and love (or loathe, depending on your saturation level). The game puts an instrument in your hands, plays a popular song you probably recognize and perhaps already enjoy, and prompts you to mimic the guitar tracks with various well timed fingerings and strums to a steady stream of notes. Only instead of five friendly buttons and a single protruding strum bar, you're in control of over 100 possible finger positions and six strings. Additionally, instead of four somewhat arbitrary difficulty settings, Rocksmith's difficulty is constantly changing based on how well you're doing. Play poorly and the game seamlessly scales back the complexity of the guitar line flying towards you. Play well and the the track gets more complex until you're actually performing the authentic guitar part.
This is all well and good at being a thoroughly impressive guitar simulator and cranking the original Guitar Hero gameplay up to 11, but we're not actually "learning" much yet. Fundamentally, this is still just mimicking the motions and gestures of a guitarist without knowing anything about it, much like how a budgie squawking a few disjointed English phrases isn't actually speaking English. What Rocksmith offers is an entirely physical learning experience, teaching you how to handle the instrument and how to get some pleasing sounds out of it, without the crucial cognitive component. Good for those who want to learn how to parrot its sixty-something setlist, bad for those who are curious about the musical mechanics behind fret 7 on the yellow string.
This particular deficiency is all the more disheartening not just because its presentation and utilization of guitar techniques is entirely superficial, but because I actually feel that Rocksmith has genuine potential to be an effective music teacher. For starters, its notation system is completely unique. The default display (although it can be inverted to a structural approximation of common guitar tablature), imagines that you're looking through the neck from behind and arranges the strings from lowest to highest from top to bottom: Low E = Red, A = Yellow, D = Blue, G = Orange, B = Green, High E = Purple. However aside from tuning the instrument, the real names of the notes are never understood, nor are they ever seen again except to indicate chord shapes which themselves are never fully explained.
The note highway itself is also constantly shifting to focus on the currently relevant section of the 20+ frets, which can make getting oriented a bit of a headache when instructions for each note feel twice as complicated as they need to be. First you have to figure out what string the note's colour indicates, then you have to determine what fret that note will be hovering over, a process I imagine is at least twice as difficult for complete newcomers who don't know a guitar intuitively and are always looking away from the screen to ensure their hands are doing what they're told. While I reckon it would make more practical sense to have each note indicate the fret number within itself (or how about even the option to list the actual note?), there are also a variety of symbols notes can contain to indicate techniques more advanced than just "pluck yellow string at fret 7." Xs are palm-mutes, arrows up and down are hammer-ons and pull-offs, curved lines are string bends, etc. Presumably this system of notation was deemed the simplest way to facilitate all the little tricks a guitar player can perform, but it still feels far from ideal.
http://www.cheatcc.com/imagesps3/rocksmith_00.jpg
Playing "High and Dry" by Radiohead
By and large, chords are handled in a similar way as notes, except that the names of the actual chords are (thankfully) shown along with the colour-fret matching notation. So if you already know an Em barre chord, you won't have to line up your fingers to the frets one at a time when you see that otherwise mysterious colourful shape flying towards you. Yet while this is indeed welcome and appreciated, it also exemplifies the dichotomy between learning how to play and mimicking what you see.
Chords (and scales, for that matter) are demonstrated but never explained. Rocksmith does not tell you that an Em chord is the notes E, G, and B played simultaneously, that an E chord is the notes E, G# and B, and that the difference between the two is the third interval of the E major scale changing a half-step. Rocksmith has videos demonstrating what three of the common guitar scales are, but neither shows you how to play them nor explains exactly what a scale is. Even something as basic as fret 7 on the yellow string being an E or fret 5 on the Low E string being an A - the same A as the open yellow string, in fact - is completely left out.
Now admittedly, this perhaps falls outside the purview of what Rocksmith is attempting to accomplish. After all, how much is knowing about music a factor in playing it? Many people speak without the slightest clue about grammar, and many people drive without even a vague idea about how their car actually works. Who's to say that a guitarist needs to know about theory and how it all works together? My problem is that this sort of knowledge, while not at all necessary, can only enrich the experience of playing guitar, and Rocksmith seems to have actively chosen not to include any of it.
http://gamer.portail.free.fr/mid/p356/newuploads_2012_0531_2f6423491fac5ee7d85a104f71e5ea70_120605_11ampst_dawn_of_the_chordead_screen_new-0001.jpg
In almost every other regard, Rocksmith is a remarkably comprehensive tool. Many songs have multiple arrangements highlighting either the lead guitar track, the rhythm guitar track, or a combination of the two. The progressively changing difficulty guarantees that the game is at least attempting to adjust itself to the needs of the player every step of the way. There are even entire suites of arcade style guitar mini-games and technique trainers, as well as a selection of brief videos on everything from changing guitar strings to advanced techniques like pinch harmonics and two hand tapping.
Certainly mixing music theory and a novel attempt at streamlining guitar notation from the very beginning would perhaps shift from daunting to outright alienating awfully fast, but I see no reason why these topics can't be handled in a menu kept out of sight for only the curious to find. Without it, Ubisoft has done a staggering amount of work for only half of the experience. Perhaps even less than half, since Rocksmith is essentially a solitary affair and sorely lacks the strong social component integral to giving music a soul. Frankly, it's extraordinarily hard to ignore the clinical feeling of Rocksmith when your instructor is a faceless voice (though presumably that's his body in the title cards and tutorial videos), your audience is a crowd of expressionless cutouts phasing in and out of existence, and your actions are merely the utmost glorification of colour matching exercises.
Regardless, I am inclined to be generous towards Rocksmith since it is ultimately functional and occasionally quite a bit of fun. From a gameplay perspective, the most glaring flaw is its gratuitous lag between what you hear and what you see. However as long as you're playing along to what you hear and not to what you see, it actually isn't terribly problematic and the game will not deduct some annoyingly arbitrary points for actually being more punctual than the game itself. After all, music is all about "feeling the groove," isn't it?
As for other quibbles, loading times certainly haven't got any less inconvenient over the years, Rocksmith has an often painful definition of what constitutes bending a string (hope your fingertips can handle <url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE9mM_ut62Y>"Good Enough" by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers), and indicating chord patterns more liberally would make certain single note phrases in certain songs far less intimidating. Aside from that, I'm hard pressed to think of any other criticisms that can't be chalked up to a matter of taste or the quality of the guitar being used to play the game. As for myself, getting comfortable to soft nylon strings makes the thick gauge of my Ibanez archtop rather painful during prolonged sessions, and the overall setlist is just kind of bleh as far as I'm concerned (though Ubisoft does sell new songs for the game every two weeks).
Yet for me, the most fascinating aspect of Rocksmith is, hands down, how it approaches the marriage of game mechanics and guitar instruction. Its very first lesson on how to play the guitar is a simple stream of notes that is soon rather appropriately revealed to be the main riff of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones. There is no failing a song, only the increasing simplification of what you're expected to do as a penalty. And although they're often as superficial as guitar skins and amplifier tones, rewards come fast and frequently and serve as a sufficiently compelling reason to keep playing.
Indeed, if Rocksmith has learned anything from seven years of Guitar Hero and its ilk, it's that what truly made the genre explode was the immense feeling of gratification it offered to those who played such games. That same sort of positive reinforcement is present here, and is as good a form of encouragement as any to keep a person playing, only now it's being employed in service of a legitimate and admirable skill set beyond developing twitch reflexes.
http://ps2media.ign.com/ps2/image/article/743/743905/guitar-hero-ii-20061103053159088.jpg
Perhaps game designers don't make the best teachers, but they do via gamification know how to keep someone involved and interested. Thus when viewed as a complement to expert instruction, Rocksmith does have a lot of merit. Even if the guitar theory and knowledge I cherish is almost entirely ignored, the game certainly does nurture the finger strength and muscle memory involved in playing the instrument. So while I can't vouch for the instrument bundled in the $200CND version of the game, if you are interested in learning to play guitar, you've already got one lying around, and you dig its setlist, Rocksmith does have a lot to offer. But please, do invest in some real guitar lessons, too.
Developed and published by Ubisoft.
Released in October 2011 on Xbox 360 and PS3 in North America, and launching worldwide in late 2012, as well as on Microsoft Windows.
Reviewed on a dull summer day by Maet.
