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It’s been a while since I’ve written about Rocksmith, but I’m still happily putting time in on the guitar every weekend; so I figured it was time for another post about the game. And, this, time, I wanted to talk about what sorts of things I might like out of the next evolution of Rocksmith. […]

Rocksmith put out a two quite substantial free patches at the end of last year. I’ve been playing Rocksmith significantly more since the patches, and in different (and better!) ways. As I said in that post, I’ve switched my practice from being primarily based on browsing (leafing through my favorites and playing whatever catches my […]

The Rocksmith team recently released a (free!) update to Rocksmith 2014 that was substantial enough to deserve a new name: Rocksmith Remastered. It’s the same game, just better: they’ve looked at how people have used it over the last three years, where the rough edges are, how they could modify it to help your learning […]

In the September VGHVI Symposium, we talked about virtual reality, using the phrase “metaphoric presence” to describe it; we contrasted VR to immersion, which we defined as identification with a ruleset. Basically, with our definitions (or rather Roger’s definitions, though I support them) virtual reality gives the impression that you’re there, while, if you’re immersed, […]

Through this fall or winter, I’d been playing Rocksmith for a couple of hours every Saturday and Sunday, but I’d been falling off in the last few months: partly because Saturday Tai Chi ate into my time, partly because I felt like playing guitar was putting stress on my back, and partly because my playing […]

One item that I forgot to add to my earlier list of requests for the next version of Rocksmith: help us get low-latency audio. The game strongly encourages you to use optical audio; and, when I switched over to that, it made a big difference. But there’s a reason why I didn’t switch to optical […]

One of the problems people have with Rocksmith is the audio delay, but it hadn’t been too bad for me in the past: I’m not sure if I’m less sensitive to audio delay than other people, or if my receiver has a little less audio latency than some people’s AV setup? When I switched over […]

So: Harmonix announced Rock Band 4. I had mixed feelings when I filled out the survey: on the one hand, I claimed that pro instruments were most important to me, because that is after all how I spent most of my time in Rock Band 3, but, on the other hand: “pro instruments” probably really […]

When the new consoles came out, I had zero interest in getting one: I hadn’t been playing AAA games much, and nothing on the new consoles caught my eye at all. And that continued for quite a long time: until I started playing Tomb Raider a few weeks ago, I hadn’t played a newish console […]

This week’s Rocksmith DLC was a collection of classical music arranged for guitars / bass / drums; I wasn’t sure what I’d think about it in advance, but I gave it a try yesterday and it was a lot of fun! I was worried that it would be over the top, trying to turn classical […]

I’ve been playing Android: Netrunner at work over lunch maybe a couple of times a week for over a year now; three of us have been fairly devoted to the game, there’s one other person who plays occasionally, and one person has recently joined the cult as well. I like the game a lot: there’s […]

It’s been a couple of months since my first impressions of Rocksmith 2014, so time for some second impressions. First, my overall feeling about the game: my current feeling is that it’s a great game, and potentially an important one. Not necessarily important as a game so much: what I like about it so much […]

I’ve had a weekend with Rocksmith 2014 now; and my initial take is that it’s subtly better than its predecessor in a few interesting ways. I spent most of my time in the original game going through the Events that it gives you: a collection of songs each of which has a target score, so […]