Rocksmith 2014 Edition - PC/Mac (Cable Included)

I really love this game. Since I got this game, I quit playing BF4 and am rediscovering my talents on guitar.You play this one with a REAL guitar. No buttons on a plastic guitar-shaped controller. This game evaluates your actual guitar playing skills.This game will systematically teach you a variety of songs. It also has arcade style games by which you use your real guitar as a controller and while you play you build and reinforce a variety of skills.This game had to be designed by guitar players and teachers. It's apparent in the systematic way by which it steps you through the learning process.when trying to learn a new song. There is a tool called 'Riff Repeater' which allows you to adjust the speed and skill level of a song's passage of your choosing. The Riff Repeater also lets you gradually increase your skill through a passage by systematically bumping up the skill level. There are somewhere around 50 songs that come with the game. You can also import all of your songs from the original Rocksmith. Also, there are tons of song/songpacks available as DLC through Steam (Rush songpack being among my favorites).If anyone has the patience to sit down and learn to play, this tool will get you there with far less expense than going to lessons. There's no replacing a teacher when it comes to developing picking and finger technique, but if you combine this tool with online technique videos, you'll have a lot more fun practicing to Muse, Billy Talent, or Weezer than you would playing Clair de lune and Mary had a little lamb for a few months before learning your first modern song. You'll still build those basic skills playing something like the Black Keys at low difficulty level. You can go at your own pace. The "game" can teach you lead, rhythm and bass guitar for each song. It's up to you how you progress. My plan is to follow the 'Lead Guitar' path, then go to rhythm and then bass.The only thing that's not really realistic about this game is how it automatically switches your effects at the right time for your with no intervention from you. On the one hand, you sound just like the originally player in the song you're playing while you learn the song note by note. On the other hand, you don't have the fun of dealing with having all the effects pedals and turning all the knobs to just the right positions. You don't have the fun of stomping on the button to engage the effects at just the right time and you don't have to deal with battery or power problems on your pedals.There are plenty of song packs to add to the 50 that already come with the game. A wide variety of songs are available in all. The "game" aspect of it always has you striving for a higher score on a song and ranks you among other players in the world. Once you have a song down, you can choose to go to a 'Score Attack' mode by which you can continue to increase your rank versus other players.The "game" also includes a session mode by which you pick from a variety a band members who play along following your lead. I just discovered this part of the "game" last night.It's really hard to call this a game. It combines two of my favorite things: 1) Playing guitar 2) Playing video games. The accuracy of the note tracking is really there. If you have any issues, you can adjust the latency within the game to match the video to the audio. With the original Rocksmith, I had to make an adjustment, but once I installed Rocksmith 2014, it was set just right. I think the way the sound is evaluated has become more accurate in the 2014 edition. Also, there is a song import tool you can get from Steam to take your original Rocksmith songs and port them over to Rocksmith 2014. With the new tools in the 2014 edition (ie Riff Repeater) importing songs to the new version adds a lot to the mix and gives you a whole lot of songs to play through this game.If you put in time with this, you'd be surprised how quickly you get used to the notes moving at full speed. Check out some videos to see how this works. You can adjust the speed by which the notes move in the 'Riff Repeater'. I have about 30 hours into this game and if I find I'm having a problem with a section, I hit the 'esc' key and drop into 'Riff Repeater' mode to zero in on the notes in a particular passage of my choosing at a slower speed and with the 'Level Up' functionality, it offers an easy way to go from root notes at 75% speed to note-by-note at full speed. Also, I've found if you're in 'learn a song' mode and let's say you haven't played a particular song in a few weeks and you go back to it a find you've forgotten some parts, Rocksmith 2014 will 'recognize' this and throw fewer notes at you for the particular section you're having trouble with. Of course you can go back to the 'Riff Repeater' or practice the entire song more to get back to where you were or improve your playing.There are arcade games by which you can work on different skills which start out easy and get progressively harder. Some help you move around the fret board, some help you with chord switching, some with bends... Also, most of the techniques you need to play most songs are in 'Lesson' mode by which you can learn things as simple as how to hold a guitar or pick to things more complicated such as advanced playing techniques like slides and hammer-ons.The more time you spend with it, the more you find out how to use it as a real tool to learn guitar.I'm really happy I found a game like this and that someone produces something like this. It's really a great tool and makes learning the songs more fun than staring at a black and white staff.Note- If you're used to using tablature, to save you some frustration, I strongly suggest you go into 'Settings' and 'invert' the note presentation otherwise your lower notes are portrayed at the top of the staff (this is even contrary to standard music notation) as if you're looking through the back of the neck. You have the choice. I also recommend anyone new to playing guitar/bass go with the inverted setting from the start so that if they continue with playing outside the game and ever encounter tablature in the future, it will be an easier transition.

First, get ready to have Steam installed on your computer, which is apparently a way for them to protect themselves from piracy and provide you with downloadable purchases. It also socializes your experience by forcing you to have a "Steam" account. This infuriates me as I don't care to sign up for some third party provider in order to use the game I purchased. Heck, pirating it would be easier because you might get to skip the Steam experience and forced automatic update (although illegal and not recommended or encouraged even though I think this company needs a fine "F YOU" for their horrible installation experience.And about those auto downloads --- I purchased this item on CD because I live in a rural community where high speed internet isn't available in any form that isn't limited to a ridiculously small amount of download bandwith per month. I've had the game since December 2013. It is now May, 2014 and I still haven't gotten to try it out. Why? Because it automatically started downloading from the web over 6 GB of data. My monthly limit is only 10GB - and it's slower than molasses during a blizzard. I finally figured out how to install it from disk and though the problem was solved. I was wrong. I installed it and this "Steam" thing started its job of forcing me through a bunch of stuff that you wouldn't think would be needed to put a CD in your computer, install a game and start playing. Eventually, I gave up - not because it was "hard" per se, but because it was taking hours upon hours just to get through the installation process --- and I'm pretty sure there is no way to install the product without internet access.Tonight, I decided to try installing it again on my brand new, super fancy, seriously sup'd up computer... I've been waiting for the updates to finish while writing this review for over 2 hours, with a couple of more to go --- maybe it's a good game. Maybe it's as blast. But if you are one of the gazillion folks in rural US ---- skip this completely. It forces your gaming experience to be online.