Not much to write here; I’ve been playing Rocksmith a lot (including both Tuesday and Wednesday this week, I think?), and having my usual grand time. The bug about new songs being at 0 difficulty is real but manageable: it only affects the first new song you play in a session, and that one you can fix by going into riff repeater, setting the difficulty to something reasonable, and exiting. And, browsing the forums, the bug about existing song difficulty levels being reset to something that doesn’t take into account your progress is also real, and in fact affects some other people pretty severely, but it isn’t affecting me too much. Still, I do hope we’ll have fixes for that.

Speaking of downloads: Tomoyasu Hotei is great, The Who is fine but less fun to play than I expected, and one of the B’z songs was pretty good. I’ve also been spending a fair amount of time in session mode; I still like it and am impressed by it, but I’m also feeling my playing there is a little repetitive/boring; I should try session mode in the rhythm path and see if it shows me chords to play instead of notes. Also, I noticed that Love Hurts has an alternate lead, I should try that one more.

It’s really time for me to write more about the game on my main blog, though.

I finished going through all of my old songs on Rocksmith 2014 on Saturday, so I bought some DLC. Which may or may not have been the wisest decision—I’ve only played through most of the Rocksmith 2014 on-disc songs once so far—but there’s already been a fair amount of quite good seeming DLC released since that game was released, so I felt a little behind.

And I ran smack into a bug I’d seen before where it showed reasonable difficulty levels on the screen to start playing a song, but when you hit start it resets all the difficult levels to the lowest level. So I guess that’s a bug in how the game handles newly-added songs, given that I’d seen it before for unlockable songs? It only happened on one out of three songs today; for the other two, I went in and out of the selection screen before playing them, maybe that’s a way to avoid triggering the bug or maybe it’s just random.

I did at least find a reasonable way to recover from the bug: I went into Riff Repeater mode, manually bumped up the difficulty (and selected a long stretch), played through it once (doing well enough that it was happy), and then resumed playing normally. That seemed to have worked; annoying that I had to do it.

That’s actually not the only bug in that area that I’ve run into: a fair number of songs seem to have had their difficulty levels reset, so I’ll be presented with a flat (but at least not horribly low) difficulty rating for songs that I’ve played in some cases dozens of times. No idea what’s going on there; the good thing is that, by replaying the song once, I can generally get back to close to the right level for everything but solos. (And I’m not particularly good at solos anyways.)

The other thing that happened this weekend is that I tried Session Mode for the first time. And I will say: I’m super impressed by that. The game presents a virtual band that will accompany you as you noodle around; you can select what key and what scale you’re working in, and some other parameters that control chord changes (e.g. there’s a 12-bar blues mode), and then you just play away and it will add other instruments doing something that sounds reasonable. I put off trying this for a couple of months, but now that I’ve tried it, I think I’ll return to it every weekend, it’s a really good idea and I certainly need the encouragement to do more messing around.

Pictures from the November Minecraft session:

This was a pretty major upgrade; right from the start, I could see the rendering engine changed, and while it was generally an improvement (I think I got longer view distances), sometimes it looked a bit odd:

Strange stripes on the water

And the new graphics engine did seem to be a little more prone to temporary glitches, here’s an example:

A glitch near the city

I also saw some filters when playing around with the options; maybe they’d been there for a while and I only just now noticed them, I’m not sure.

Filter one

Filter two

Filter three

Filter four

While wandering around, I saw a tower that I didn’t remember ever seeing before; surprising, given how close it was to town:

A tower with tracks

The bottom of the track

Riding down the tracks

Runaway cart!

That’s gotta hurt

It took ages to take the picture riding down: I normally use the left shift key when grabbing screenshots, but that caused me to exit from the cart. Half the time I forgot and used it anyways, half the time I tried and failed to contort my hand with the right shift key.

There were also new items in the update; Miranda added some of the new flowers to the house we’d been working on:

Planting flowers

More flowers

Flowers around the back

Taller flowers in the stable

Final design of the stable flowers

Dan was building some abstract geometric shapes:

Red and black

A closer view, showing a glass/lava cube underneath

There’s another cube in the sky

He built that far away, so it took me a while to get back home from there. Along the way, I ran into a forest with large, flat treetops:

Approaching the forest

Giant mushrooms next to the tree

A lava pool

Flowers under the canopy

Tree-dwelling sheep

Another rendering glitch a bit later

And then I ran into a village; it was pretty impressive.

Approaching the village

Meeting the villagers

Inside a building

Looking out to sea

Bidding farewell

I can’t remember the context of this photo, but I have no memory of ever seeing this object before:

A strange midair object

And one last photo; somebody must have been here before and left a candle.

Desert glow

Not much to report since last time; I keep on playing Rocksmith 2014, it continues to be great. I’ve now gone through almost all of the music that I own that has a lead guitar part, maybe 10 or so songs left? Actually, that “lead guitar” caveat is interesting; I think I prefer the original game’s way of doing things where they threw you the most interesting part, whether it was a lead guitar part or not. Not that it’s bad to have an option to, say, concentrate on rhythm, but this is one area where the game’s realism is not what I want. And it’s certainly silly that I can’t actively choose a non-lead part from within a song, I have to change paths for the other parts to be visible.

I was getting annoyed by it constantly recommending Desolate Motion to me but then not letting me play it because it needed some sort of Uplay thing to work, and whenever I connected to Uplay it told me “could not connect to servers”. It turns out that what I needed to do was go to the Uplay web site, create an account, and link it to my Xbox Live account; so a perfectly reasonable set of steps, but it would have been nice if the error message actually told me that. At any rate, I now have that song unlocked; it’s more virtuosic than I like, but not as bad a song as I feared. And I also unlocked other parts; I’m not sure what all they are, but having the alternate lead for Peace of Mind was appreciated. (Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it should have been behind a gate.)

I ran into a weird bug both on Desolate Motion and on another one (Impossible Dreams, which I did quite like) where it set the difficulty level for all sections to zero. I’ve seen that once before, I can’t remember if the other song where I saw that was also unlockable? I hope that won’t continue.

And I ran into a couple of situations where the new Master Mode seems not to be behaving ideally: basically, it’s when there’s a section that gets repeated with minor variations. When that happens, I sometimes get to where I’m not seeing notes when I hit a variation, so I make a mistake; then, it starts fading in the notes, but by then I’ve passed the variation, so I don’t know what I did wrong. And when I repeat, the same thing happens. So I end up never learning what went wrong unless I drop into Riff Repeater mode. At least I think that’s what happened to me twice today, I didn’t go to the trouble of verifying; and I still definitely prefer the new Master Mode to both the old one and to not having Master Mode available at all.

My strings are starting to not hold their tuning well, I guess it’s time to replace them, I’ll do that this week. At least now I’m aware of how they behave when that happens.