Rocksmith: reduce latency and increase fun
Rocksmith, the real guitar game from Ubisoft, is available in France since the middle of this week. 'Cos I'm a guitar player since a long time (but for fun, I'm not that good), I bought the game to see how good it is.
And it's a remarkable game. When you play Rocksmith you play a video game in which you have the feeling of playing guitar, 'cos in fact you really play guitar! Sometimes it can be boring to learn to play a song, but with Rocksmith it's really fun, and you really learn well.
The game structure is very similar to Rock Band: you play each songs independently, and when you are good at them, you play the all concert with an encore with a new song if you are good. The adaptive difficulty works great too. In a song, there are patterns that repeats several times. The first time you play a pattern, it will be simple with few notes, but if you play it several time with success, some notes will be added the next time you will encounter it. It's seamless and really accurate.
The small disappointment is the latency you can experience when you hit the strings (there's a delay with the sound that comes out of your tv). However you can play with it but it's really difficult to use the built-in amps and effects pedals in the free play mode with this latency.
Fortunatly You can remove this latency. It's explained in the game manual, but they talk about "better" or "good" experience. In fact it's all about the latency. The solution is to plug your PS3 to external speakers with an analog RCA cable, and to set the sound output to analog in the PS3 system settings. For the video you can plug your PS3 to your tv with a hdmi cable. I suppose you can do a similar thing with the Xbox 360.
Bonus: a great infography!
The game structure is very similar to Rock Band: you play each songs independently, and when you are good at them, you play the all concert with an encore with a new song if you are good. The adaptive difficulty works great too. In a song, there are patterns that repeats several times. The first time you play a pattern, it will be simple with few notes, but if you play it several time with success, some notes will be added the next time you will encounter it. It's seamless and really accurate.
The small disappointment is the latency you can experience when you hit the strings (there's a delay with the sound that comes out of your tv). However you can play with it but it's really difficult to use the built-in amps and effects pedals in the free play mode with this latency.
Fortunatly You can remove this latency. It's explained in the game manual, but they talk about "better" or "good" experience. In fact it's all about the latency. The solution is to plug your PS3 to external speakers with an analog RCA cable, and to set the sound output to analog in the PS3 system settings. For the video you can plug your PS3 to your tv with a hdmi cable. I suppose you can do a similar thing with the Xbox 360.
Bonus: a great infography!