Seriously, Rocksmith is the coolest "video game" ever.

Can I gush for a moment?

Of course I can. It's my damn blog.

I've been playing Ubisoft's excellent, excellent Rocksmith more or less non-stop since mom got it for me as a Christmas gift. Link to their website is here, so I'm going to assume you click it and watch their intro video to get a hint of what it's like.

Part of the appeal is being on a console system, but calling it a "game" is a misnomer. It's a guitar trainer, utilizing something no other guitar lesson teacher trainer person or program can ever give you: immediate audio-visual feedback. The game more or less turns your home entertainment system into a glorified amp for any electric guitar, including an actual amp mode which lets you throw on up to 3 custom pedals to change the sound. (Significantly cheaper than actually going out and buying a ton of pedals!)

Let me re-iterate that: ANY electric guitar. If you've got a quarter-inch plug in for your guitar, you can use it with the game's cable. It's got a quarter-inch on one side and a USB plug on the other. No special guitar needed. If you've got a $600 dollar sexy Gibson something or other, use it. Pretty awesome if you ask me.

The way it teaches you songs is pretty intuitive, as well. The better you play, the more of the song it throws your way. We'll use the first song the game throws your way as a sample: Satisfaction by Rolling Stones. The basic riff of the song is simple going 2-2---245-5-54-42-2 on your second string (I really need to memorize which all the strings are in their default basic tuning). It'll just have you play the 2 and the 5 beginning each segment. Then it throws in the 4 on you. Then after you prove you have that part down, it throws in the hammer-ons and pull-offs.  I am relatively certain the game tracks if you're playing correctly even if it doesn't show the notes to you, because songs where I already knew how to play them leveled up a lot faster even when I "missed" notes than songs I played perfectly but just the notes it showed me on screen. Perhaps it's just rhythm and timing were better so it just seemed that way, but it's worth mentioning my observations either way.

The song selection is pretty awesome. I haven't encountered anything which has made my ears bleed yet, something Rock Band definitely struggles with at times. (Seriously, no more death metal on the basic disc please!) Currently I'm working on a Kings of Leon song called Use Somebody. I'm like 97% on the song and I've got all the segments maxed out. Makes me happy. It's the type of song I think I could sing while playing too, so that's cool. It's also Kings of Leon so girls will squee if I could actually play it well (or so I imagine.)

Lastly, there's a bunch of mini-games to help with various aspects of guitar-playing. The first one is called "Ducks" and it's basically a guitar version of Asteroids. Little ducks come down lanes designated by frets and depending on the color, you pluck that string and that note to fire a little laser to shoot them down. Starts off easy, then gets really fast to the point you can't go look down at your hands to find the right spot and expect to be able to look up again without missing several other ducks. The trainer for scales is pretty straightforward, simply having a little guy ride along on the note and if you don't play the next one in time, you dude falls off. The more you play in a row, the faster it comes to you. My personal favorite is Chord Zombies, where zombies rise up in different chord shapes and you have to play that chord to shoot them and keep them from eating your brains.

There are some pretty glaring flaws I hope get patched soon. For starters, there's a "lives" thing in the trainer modes for specific segments of songs. That to me seems kind of superfluous. It'd be better if it just repeated that segment over and over til you got it, because I mean that's what anyone would do if the game was present or not. Kicking you back out after you fail a segment 5 times in a row is counter-productive. I've seen enough hate toward that particular idea on Ubisoft's forums I think it's going to be axed whenever a future patch hits.

Most glaring as a flaw (and it's something you can't code around) is HDTV audio lag. If you are like me running through just an HDTV, there's about a half-second delay in the audio between when you hit the note and it comes through the speakers. When you're really jamming to a song, you don't really notice it but while learning a song, it's frustrating. Apparently hooking audio from your Xbox of PS3 directly into home theater speakers solves this problem but that's another $30 cable and however much more on speakers if you don't already own some. The other solution is to simply use an old standard definition TV, but then you have to deal with that ugly blur from yesteryear we have almost already forgot existed as a society.

You guys all know me by now: I don't like assigning a number to my game reviews. Numbers are so arbitrary and fluctuate on the day (I know people who give 8's to games they like significantly better than games they've given 9's to.) For the purpose the game was intended for, it's near perfect. Anyone with a guitar and a modern console should at the very least look into it. It's cheaper than a month of guitar lessons and arguably more effective!