There was a time, not too long ago, where you could barely move for plastic guitar-based music games. Easy to pick up and play, thanks to their large, friendly buttons, yet oddly satisfying, as you strummed away on a slightly more solid version of an air guitar, the games were at one point nothing short of a phenomenon. To begin with, it was Guitar Hero that led the pack, with Guitar Hero 3 alone generating in excess of a billion dollars of revenue, before the mantle passed to Rock Band, which raised the bar even higher by adding support for vocals, drums, and harmonies. But then, all of a sudden, the market seemed to dry up. With greed having took the place of common sense, the market quickly became flooded by games of ever decreasing quality, as publishers pushed to release more and more games to cash in on the trend - 2009 actually saw four Guitar Hero games alone (Metallica, Smash Hits, Van Halen, and the more mass-market focused Band Hero), which led the bottom to fall out of the market.
In 2012, however, things are a little bit different. It's been a while since the last guitar game came out, and there's no new Rock Band or Guitar Hero on the horizon, with most publishers seeming to believe that the market has long since moved on. But perhaps there's more demand for a guitar game than some may think. Perhaps all that's needed is a slightly different spin - a unique selling point, something to make it feel somehow "different" to other music games, and capture that magic all over again. In a nutshell, that's basically what Ubisoft are hoping will happen with Rocksmith, the latest contender to the music game crown - and it's certainly got a rather unique selling point.
Yep, that's a real guitar. A normal, common or garden guitar. Erk.
You see, if you want to play Rocksmith, you won't be playing on a plastic, expensive, yet somewhat fragile imposter - instead, you'll have to use the real thing. Yes, unlike pretty much every music game that came before it, Rocksmith sees you playing a real guitar, playing real tabs, and learning how to play real songs. And you don't even have to go out and buy a special, Rocksmith branded guitar with all sorts of fancy workings inside, either - instead, you can use any electric guitar with the game. So long as it has an input jack, you're good to go. Sounds cool, right? Sounds pretty intimidating, too.
So, it was with plectrum bending trepidation that we approached Ubisoft's recent Rocksmith event, where we'd get to go hands-on with the game for ourselves. Now, we're not entirely unfamiliar with a guitar - we've at least held one, and know roughly how it works - but we're a long way from being able to play any songs. Or chords, for that matter. Or notes. In fact, Rock Band is probably the closest we've ever come to playing a guitar - and as Rocksmith shows, there's a world of difference between playing a real one, and what you've been used to so far.
Luckily for us, though, Rocksmith's been designed with beginners in mind. From an entire series of tutorial videos that tell you everything you could ever want to know about a guitar, to the funky minigames, which basically encourage you to explore the guitar, and help you familiarise yourself with what's admittedly a fairly alien instrument when you first pick it up, Rocksmith aims to make learning to play the guitar fun. As an example, one of the minigames we played, "Ducks", is designed to help you memorise the positions of the frets. With columns going horizontally across the screen, representing each fret, every now and then, a pixelated, space invaders-style duck will take off up the column - and it's up to you to quickly work out which fret it's flying up, hold it, and strum, in order to shoot it down. Other minigames have been designed to help you get your head around chords, timing, and strumming, acting as much as an introduction to the interface of the game as they do to guitars.
It's a fairly intimidating looking interface, but it's (surprisingly) a lot easier to get your head around than it looks, with the horizontal and vertical bars working together to tell you which strings to strum.
After spending a while on the minigames, it was off to play a proper song, choosing from the game's line-up of more than 50 tracks. After scrolling through the selection (many of which we've admittedly never heard of), we eventually settled on the Kings of Leon's Use Somebody - purely because we thought it would be fairly easy. But one of the first differences you'll likely notice between Rocksmith and other, similar games, is that here you don't actually get to choose a difficulty level for yourself. Instead, once you start playing, the game will dynamically adjust its difficulty level to suit. With the song playing in the background, you'll start off by playing only one or two notes every bar - if you hit the notes, and complete the phrases, the game will gradually start to rake the difficulty up, until you're playing the entire song for real. And that's when Rocksmith clicked.
Whenever we've tried to play guitar before, it's been something of an awkward experience. We'd sat there with a tab in front of us many a time, attempting to play a song, and it was as painful as it was unsuccessful. We ended up playing a few notes, then pausing for a few seconds while we moved our fingers around in a vain attempt to hold the right frets - and basically, it sounded awful. You had no idea what song you were playing, anyone listening would have no idea what song you were playing, and in the end, we simply gave up. But not here. Although you're only playing a tiny part of the song - a note here or there to begin with, you're still playing the song. It's you, playing. You hold the guitar, you hold the fret, you pluck the string, and it makes the noise - you're not just pressing buttons in time with a song playing in the background, you're not triggering a sound clip - you are the guitar part - as you can prove, by sliding your finger up and down on the fret, and listening to the pitch change. It's an incredible feeling, and it's also incredibly rewarding. Rather than getting confused by a tab, you can jump straight in, and start playing songs straight away - and even though it's a simplified rendition, it doesn't detract from the sense of achievement.
Next up was In Bloom by Nirvana, which showed us another of Rocksmith's fancy features, as this was a song that was a little bit trickier than the Kings of Leon. Again, to begin with, things started off slowly enough - a few notes here and there, quickly building up to something that resembled the song a lot more closely - but then it threw a chord at us. Argh! Needless to say, our fingers were left dazed and confused - we'd barely picked up a guitar for the first time, and could just about handle playing a single string at one time - but a chord?? This was a foreign and disturbing concept - but luckily, Rocksmith again had something to help ease us in. After finishing the song, we headed into a cool little mode which let us choose the chord we were messing up, and broke it down into individual strings for us to practice. Getting us to play each of the notes in order, before playing it as chord together, it was a nice little feature that really helped you understand where your fingers need to be - and meant we aced the chord the next time we came across it. Chalk one up for practice.
The colours, the notes, and the numbers all really help when you're just finding your way around the game.
But perhaps the most impressive part of our time with Rocksmith was that it actually all worked. The game's based around what you may imagine is fairly complex technology - by way of a fancy USB cable, you connect your guitar to your PS3, PC or Xbox 360, which then converts an analogue signal (coming from your guitar), into a digital format so the game can understand it. In all honesty, going in, we were expecting missed notes, awkward tuning problems, and the game to simply not recognise we were playing - but happily, our experience was nothing but positive. The game worked, and, most importantly, it worked well. Other reports have mentioned lag, but it's not something that we noticed on the day - although we can only really be sure after testing it in on our own.
Set to launch at the end of this month, we shouldn't have too long to go before it's back in our hands. Hitting these shores roughly a year after the US release, as a way of making up for the delay, Ubisoft are apparently bundling a few extra songs on the disc, that were released as paid download in America, along with the Bass expansion, which adds the ability to play bass parts for each of the songs - either using a real bass, or a normal guitar that the game tones down an octave to make it sound right. You'll also be able to buy the game either on its own, or, if you'd prefer, as part of a Les Paul bundle, which comes with a proper, full sized guitar for £122.47
By taking a different tack, and focusing on playing a real guitar, making real music, Rocksmith has us excited all over again. Playing it at the event managed to capture some of that same magic that came from picking up Guitar Hero for the first time, only this time turned up a notch, as the reward you felt for finally nailing that section was so much greater. Although we couldn't play the guitar, and we'd say we still can't, after a few hours with Rocksmith, we really felt like we were making progress - and we can't wait to play it again. In all, Rocksmith may be just what the music genre needs to get the ball rolling again.
