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.

I had a great time practicing guitar this weekend. I finished the (non-unlockable) Rocksmith 2014 songs; a solid collection, though there aren’t too many I’m madly in love with, and maybe it has a little more metal than I’d like? (But it’s by no means actively metal-heavy, don’t get me wrong.) And I dipped into a couple more lessons; I think I could probably benefit from doing those more.

But what impressed me the most about the game is that I finally started taking Riff Repeater mode seriously, and it’s really good. It’s super-configurable, for better or for worse, but once you get the options right, the result is great. Some of the configuration lets you mimic the different modes from the original Rocksmith; but some is new. I appreciate having control over how few mistakes I have to make before it bumps me up a speed/difficulty level: the original game’s desire for almost-perfection as something I found annoying, but it also seems reasonable to put that under my control because sometimes I want to be asked to hit every note in a section. And, no matter what, I appreciate having not only a count of how many notes I missed but also being shown the specific wrong notes on the repeat, so I can see where I need to focus more.

I think that combined with the vast number of tracks I have available to me means that I’m going to spend more and more time working on individual songs; I still like being confronted with random songs, I can easily imagine me spending more than half of my practice time in one of the more random modes (either recommendations or nonstop play), but I want to dig into individual songs more. (And the fact that the game lets me flag some songs as “favorites” helps with that, too.)

I’m also coming to terms with alternate tunings more. I don’t exactly like having to change my tuning between songs, but with new strings, it’s not nearly as bad as it had been. So I’ve stopped fleeing alternate tuning songs when I run into them in nonstop mode.

Lots going on with the game, I should probably gather my thoughts write another post about it on my main blog…

Pictures from the October VGHVI Minecraft session:

At first, I decided to wander around the house and the cave beneath it.

A bat decided to visit our house

Some stairs I’d forgotten about in the cave

The bottom of the stairs

I guess I dug a bit too deep…

Then I wandered around the city; it turns out that there were some pillars stretching up above it that I wasn’t aware of.

A mysterious glass pillar

The top of the pillar

Looking down at the city

There’s a brick pillar, too

It’s been a while since I’ve visited the temple

Hello, golden donkey

After that, Miranda called me over to the eagle tower that Pat had built a while ago, and we played hide-and-seek there.

The top of the eagle tower

The lower part of the eagle tower

Inside the tower

Hiding place 1

Hiding place 2

While we were doing that, Dan was building a big tower out of lava, way in the middle of nowhere:

The top of the lava tower

Looking down into a pool of lava

Hello, lava

Miranda bathing in lava

The base of the tower

Looking up from the base

The view from under the base

And then I started wandering back; I had no idea where I was, so I had to turn on debug info to find my way.

A sheepy cave

A strange corner

I got my guitar back on Saturday from having it set up; I can’t remember exactly what he said he fixed, but he adjusted the frets and intonations, and said it should buzz less. Felt a little better when I played it in the shop, but now I’ve adjusted to the new feel and I can’t really tell the difference; it was good before, it’s good now.

Actually, probably the biggest difference right now is just having new strings. (Ernie Ball Rock and Roll; I think I like them about as much as the Gibson Humbuckers I’d been using?) I assume that’s the reason why I spent less time fighting the tuning in Rocksmith this weekend; good thing, too, because I’ve gotten to a section of the songs where nonstandard tunings are coming right and left. (I played through three in E flat / dropped D flat today, and three or for in E flat standard.) On the one hand, I wish there weren’t so many songs in nonstandard tunings; on the other hand, some of them I’m definitely glad are there. (E.g. Ultra Soul by B’z, in standard tuning but with a 444 A; chord progressions that are unusual to me when I play them but that I’ve heard in other J-pop.)

And there are songs that I am not glad are there: I think Rocksmith 2014 goes a little further into metal than the original did, and I have zero interest in learning how to play, say, Slayer’s War Ensemble. But I’m sure there are people who think that’s great, and I have more than enough other songs to play to keep me very busy; my main request right now is a way to flag individual songs as ones that I don’t want to see in recommendations. (Hmm, now that I think about it, I’ve seen references to removing songs from Nonstop Mode; I should look into how that works.) Maybe it’s there, I haven’t looked super hard, it’s just not obvious to me.

At any rate, a pleasant weekend of guitar. I’m most of the way through the new songs; I think I probably have 10-15 left to go through, I’m not sure? And for songs I like I’ve been going through them a few times; I still haven’t started really focusing on learning individual songs by dropping into Riff Repeater mode. Eventually I’ll do that, honest I will…

Oh, the other new thing that happened this time was that I got put into Master mode for the first time. I really like how that works: I appreciate the warning that fading out the notes gives me, it hasn’t yet done it on any sections that it’s not plausible for me to learn, and it’s sent me back out when I started messing up. So my first reaction is that it looks great: nudges towards memorizing songs without throwing me in the deep end.

I decided to bring my guitar in to get set up today; that will take a week, which means no Rocksmith tomorrow.

Today was interesting, though. I learned that the game models tapping; which, on the one hand, sounds like a technique that I should learn, but on the other hand mostly occurs in sorts of music that I’m not all that interested in playing? The one song that I played today didn’t do anything to disabuse me of either notion, at any rate. A bit frustrating that the game had a hard time detecting notes that I could hear just fine; I think its detection on the upper E string is not so great, I run into problems when tuning that string.

On which topic: another one of the songs I was playing today was in E flat / dropped D flat tuning, which meant retuning all the strings. And that was a pain, both getting it in tune to play that song and then getting it back in regular tune. I’m tentatively thinking that a lot of what’s going on there is that I need to replace my strings; another side benefit of getting it set up, I’ll have to keep that in mind the next time the game seems to be acting odd tuning-wise.

Not a whole lot to say other than that; a pleasant enough practice session, tuning and tapping frustrations aside. Oh, and the tone-switching on Subdivisions makes that song a little more annoying to play than in the original Rocksmith: the tone that they use for the arpeggiated sections brings out the audio delay somehow. Maybe at some point I’ll see if I can plug headphones directly into the 360? I also browsed the lessons to see what other techniques there were that I hadn’t learned; I’m mostly done with them, but I see more advanced lessons for techniques that I’ve seen the basic lessons for, so more lessons for me to go to. And certainly lots more practice for me to do on techniques that I’ve been exposed to; I did a bit better today at muting with my fretting hand than I have been, at least…

Rocksmith 2014 showed up this week, so I played it on Tuesday, Saturday, and Sunday. But I ended up having enough to say about it that I wrote about it on my main blog rather than here, so: Rocksmith 2014 first impressions!

One thing that I didn’t mention there: I’m enjoying the songs in game quite a bit, which I wasn’t entirely sure would be the case going in. Yay for more Rush and Boston (are we going to get the rest of that album as DLC?), but also yay for random songs that I’m less familiar with. I’m still worried that there’s going to be a bit more metal than I can like, but the game gives me enough options to skip songs that I’m not in the mood for that that will be fine; between both games plus DLC I’m certainly not lacking in options to play…

Not much to report for the last couple of weeks; the one new song I’ve gotten is Wish You Were Here, which has the distinction of being a little harder than it seems and causing my hand to hurt. Both, I think, caused by its copious use of inverted power chords (or whatever you call them—like power chords but with a fourth on the bottom instead of fifth), I’m probably gripping too tightly and putting too much pressure on my pinky?

And I’ve been playing a bit of guitar outside of Rocksmith, too, trying to learn Itsumo Nando Demo. Memorizing it is a little harder than I somehow think it should be, but tractable.

But really the most distinctive aspect of this week is that it’s the end of this iteration of Rocksmith practice: Rocksmith 2014 is coming out on Tuesday. I’m curious to see what improvements they’ve done; sounds like mostly usability improvements, which is fine with me. And having more songs to play is always welcome, of course.