Guitar Status: December 8, 2013

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.