Buy Rocksmith 2014 Edition - "No Cable Included" Version for Rocksmith

Customer Ratings:
List Price: $59.99
Sale Price: $59.96
Today's Bonus: $0.03 Off

So first off, let me say that I have playing guitar and bass professionally for about 15 years and have been teaching for about 4, so I am definitely not a beginner when it comes to the instrument, but I originally bought Rocksmith for the simple fact that you could plug in your own guitar into your XBox and use it as your controller.

Okay, so onto the main pros and cons:

PROS:

The game feels much more stable than the original. My old Rocksmith would freeze and crash randomly, but after a full night's session of gaming, I never had any problems with 2014. The animation is smooth even when there's a lot going on, and everything loads up nice and fast. I thought the game was malfunctioning when it was seemingly randomly backing out of menus on its own, but I soon learned that it uses the Kinect for voice commands, unless you turn that feature off!

The guitar tone system seems much improved. Not only do the tones themselves sound quite a bit more authentic, but also we aren't limited to the one guitar tone per song. The game automatically switches tones for you at different points in the song. I thought this was a nice addition.

Love the fact that you are now able to change difficulty and volume settings on the fly at any point during the game, this is a MAJOR improvement.

Wide variety of songs included. While some may complain that there are a bunch of unfamiliar bands/songs, I like being exposed to a lot of music I wouldn't normally hear. All of the songs I played through were fun to play. Even without all the DLC I have obtained, Rocksmith 2014 still has a ton of songs to choose from.

Fret numbers are shown under some of the notes as the come on screen especially for the big position shifts, this is super helpful.

The technique videos are really well done this time and a GREAT teaching tool for beginners!

SESSION MODE is an absolute blast! This is essentially a "jam simulator" where you can choose your band picking what kind/sound of bass, drums, guitar, and other instruments like a banjo or kazoo(!), pick the key, tempo, and overall feel. Then, you just start jamming. The game shows you particular scales you can use for jamming and the rest of the band reacts to your intensity, dynamics, and even the notes you play. This mode is simply incredible in my opinion.

CONS:

Lots of graphical additions make somethings confusing. There's little amp speakers on either side of the screen that move with sound waves whenever you play something, but these can get in the way of the fretboard and note colors. I really preferred the original stripped down look of the original interface, because with the new graphics it can be a bit harder to see the colors and the notes. Especially with chords or multiple notes, it's not as clear as to how many times you should play the chord, or even with someof the techniques, it was hard to tell what was a bend sometimes, although I do like that they specify 1/2 step and whole step bends now. There's just a little too much going on overall graphically. Maybe this will change as you unlock venues? The only I have so far just shows a vague silhouette of an audience, and it makes me miss the "stage view" of the original Rocksmith and with the crowd and lights reacting to how well you're playing.

There's a manual included in-game, but there's a lot of things it doesn't really explain. For instance, it identifies what the Harmonicity Meter is in Session Mode, but doesn't really explain how it works exactly. The same about the Kinect Voice commands. There's a point where I can turn them on and off, but nothing saying what the commands are.

Scrolling through songs is a bit of a pain. Sure you can sort them by different categories, but the only way to scroll through is to use the up and down on the D-pad. It'd be nice to scroll through a page using left or right.

In the initial set up, the game asks you for your skill level. I chose Experienced, but I'm not sure how that factors in with anything, because every song still starts on the lowest difficulty level. Again, back to the manual it would be nice if there was some more information in-game on how a lot of these features work.

I do miss the "Ranks" of the original Rocksmith game. I liked the competition of having to score points to gain levels and ranks and unlock new stuff. I understand Rocksmith's primary focus is to be a teaching tool, but what would really complete the game for me would be a sort of "Career Mode" like in Rockband or Guitar Hero where you play gigs for fans and such. Looks like there are some Leaderboard challenges though, so we'll have to see how those work.

Maybe this could be an additional Career Mode Add-on Pack down the road? We'll see.

I haven't explored the Guitarcade or Multiplayer modes much yet, so I can't review those.

Overall, I think Ubisoft got it right with this 2014 re-vamping of the game. There are some major improvements overall, and they completely outdid themselves with the Session Mode jamming simulator. Still some elements missing that could really make this a complete package.

Definitely worth getting whether or not you own the original!

Juat a quick note: If you want to use any of the on-disk songs that came with the original Rocksmith, you'll have to pay $10 for the Import Tool at the XBox Live Marketplace to cover the re-licensing fees for the songs.

Click Here For Most Helpful Customer Reviews >>

Night and Day better than the original, and I liked the original alot

biggest improvement by far is the "on the fly" Riff repeater, its a huge deal to jsut stop right in the middle of a song and set it up how you want and practice that section till the cows come home, then just jump back into the song........no hidden menu 4 menus deep to go find.

Session mode is going to be an outstanding feature........when I stop sucking at guitar anyhow

Missions are a welcome addition, sometimes if you lack direction, you can jsut pick a mission and move on.

Games are alot of fun and I can see where they actually help build useful skills

Tuner is a bit finicky, but doesnt seem to cause too much trouble for me anyhow.......I think its so finicky because its a finer tuning than the previous.

the kinect voice commands work great......just say the word for the buttons (ie, Accept, back, play song, guitarcade, etc.....)

$10 to import your Roscksmith 1 songs is well worth it, they have recharted them and made them more accurate, and there are licensing fees as well that have to be covered........its $10 whole dollars people stop complaining, you sound silly, you can always keep playing RS1 for free if you really dont have $10. by the way the DLC is ported to RS14 for free........its only the RS1 songs that cost the whole $10.

well theres my day one thoughts. its well worth it if your thinking on buying it.

Best Deals for Rocksmith 2014 Edition - "No Cable Included" Version for Rocksmith

I'll start off with the negative (as the list is much shorter imo). First, there are a number of features that were pretty fun in the original game that were taken away. Namely, the crowd isn't there cheering you on anymore, and there appears to be no points system, so no bonuses for bends, harmonics, and whatnot. Amp mode appears to be gone (replaced by virtual band, see below). You also don't really have a career mode that I can discern. I liked it to track my progress the first go around, but didn't like how it threw random master mode songs my way at the end. These mostly seem to have been removed to keep the game running smoother whereas the original tended to get bogged down. The interface operates differently as well. This is only sort of a negative if you're used to the old interface. It will take some getting used to, but after you learn it, it becomes a positive change.

That's about where my negative comments end. Some of the fun was taken out of the game, sure, but in trade-off it was replaced with much needed utility in the game play. The biggest improvement, and I mean huge, is the much improved sound EQ. You can hear the dynamics of your playing much better this time around, the game actively switches between tone settings now (as if hitting an effect footswitch) while you play, and the tone of your instrument is integrated with the overall sound of the song much better. In addition, the tuner is much more accurate than before, and tunings are closer to the tru tuning of the song.

The sorting system is somewhat improved. I've seen some reviews knocking it, but its easy with the bumper buttons to re-sort the songs in 'learn a song' mode by tuning, play count, date, title, artist, favorites (more on that later), etc. It still could use some tweaking, but it's improved.

In game play, the bends and slides are broken down to show you the arc of the note shift instead of a clumsy line. As the crowd isn't there taking up graphic space, the songs keep better time. Sustains are picked up easier and last longer. In addition, the notes are connected to the fretboard instead of floating, and the frets you are playing show up on the note stream so you don't have to look down at the 3,5,7 etc fret markers and guess where the song is transitioning to. Despite these improvements in user friendliness, the game is actually harder, requiring more accuracy to strike the notes, and more overall accuracy to advance a song, thus helping you to learn it better.

In addition, the leveling system is improved. That is because instead of 'mastering' a song, you master a section. This enables you to play the riffs you have down in master mode, while still playing those you haven't quite got the hang of in normal mode. This makes the learning process easier as you now have steps between the two modes.

The next great thing, well, two great things, are the favorites list and the continuous play. Favorites is simple: in learn a song mode, select the songs you play most and favorite them (y on xbox), then hit the bumper button to sort by favorites, and the ones you like playing come up. The other is continuous play. This setup is pretty simple as well; either hit begin to play what they throw at you, or pick the songs you want to play for x amount of minutes. Very handy. Actually, this is how I prefer to play this edition of rocksmith.

The last new feature I want to talk about is the virtual band jam mode (replacing amp mode apparently). Now, I must preface by saying that the sounds are very casio like hokie sounding garbage sounds. If you expect to write the next hit using this feature you'll be sorely disappointed. What the value of this feature is sort of akin to an advanced metronome. It just supplies some background sounds using different genres and different instruments you select. If you want a fun party jam session, this isn't for you, but if you want something that keeps good time and doesn't care or stop if you screw up, the background instruments provide this. It is great for just messing around in a key, practicing a riff, or just freestyling. For any musician that writes, this is a good feature to just provide a silly freeforall that you can jam to in order to get the juices flowing.

Plus you can play all the songs you own, including those from the original game (sync costs an extra fee tho, but not too bad). Also, you don't have to pay for a bass module; it's included.

In all, this is a good buy. It won't please a lot of people, but if you want to learn guitar or bass, this is leaps and bounds beyond the last installment. If you want a fun guitar hero style gameplay (and there's nothing at all wrong with that), I'd suggest the first version, which had a touch more personality. I'd say this one is more utilitarian and useful in general. Still, continuous mode is a blast and combined with the improved sound and gameplay, I'd say this is an overall improvement.

I like it.

Honest reviews on Rocksmith 2014 Edition - "No Cable Included" Version for Rocksmith

My son (13yo) used the original since it came out so I purchased the update for him. We have all the packs and songs in the original and hope that there are many updates for the new version. We did have a couple of packs we purchased in the original that are not showing up in the store. Blink-182 being one that is missing. We have had some lockups as others are saying but over 4 days of playing for 3-5 hours a day, we've probably locked up about 7-8 times. Tuning the last two strings is more difficult but if you keep plucking they do tune. You do have to purchase a $9.99 license to get the original Rocksmith songs. The leaderboards are not always accurate, sometimes only showing you as a ranking player. The 60 day challenge on UPlay\UBISoft's website is currently experiencing issues but are excited about it's future.There are other little bugs that should be cleaned up in the coming updates.

Online I can see he's played through 84 songs, completed 29 lessons, scored 7,000,000 on guitarcade, completed 42 missions. While I don't know the granular detail of what this means it's nice to be able to check online at his progress. As stated earlier, this site will only get better.

The difficulty starts at an elementary level but can quickly ramp up and it's smart enough not to start you off at the easier levels on new songs after you've played a couple of songs. My son is a Jazz Pianist for his school jazz band and has been learning the guitar over the last couple of years. He jumped straight to the Lesson 'Jazz Chords 401' and quickly learned that this game has a lot to teach him.

Even with all the issues, there is no way I could knock this down a star as my son loves play the 'learn a song', complete the 'lessons' and play the 'guitarcade'. My son has been upstairs using it since 10:00am today and it's 3:30 now. I'm going to have to stop him, that's the kind of problem I want to have. If you have a young kid that wants to play the guitar and loves video games, this may just be what you have been looking for.

Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for Rocksmith 2014 Edition - "No Cable Included" Version for Rocksmith

My 10 year old son and 39 year old self are having a blast with this game. Neither of us has ever played a "real" guitar before. We have played guitar hero, but there is just one strum bar and five buttons for frets on those guitars. For Rocksmith we have a 6 string guitar with 22 frets. That was (and still is) extremely intimidating to us.

First thing I had to do was tune my guitar. Rocksmith walked me through it and checked the tones for me (good thing for a tone deaf guy). The cool thing (for me at least) was that the software knew the problem before I did. If I hit the wrong string, it knew and told me to check which string I hit.

So I went through about 5 tutorials and tried to 100% them. The tutorials are excellent. It starts easy...if you can't get it, then it slows it down to get you used to moving across the frets and strings in time. For a noob like me, this was great. The game amazed me when it told me exactly what I was doing wrong in the tutorials (ie: wrong string, wrong fret...it knew). After you get through the first test, it does the same riff with more notes and complexities. It allowed me to practice and have a sense of success before it upped the level.

You can choose to play lead guitar, rhythm, or bass. You can use your electric guitar for bass, but I have not tried yet. I have only tried lead guitar so far but plan on trying the others.

There are 20 or so more lessons to do, but I was interested in trying a song (knowing I would fail). Low and behold, they actually up the level of play on each song as you improve. So the first time through the easier songs was not impossible even for me to achieve some success. I felt like "I can actually do this with some practice".

The part I recently tried was the guitarcade which is awesome. Retro style arcade games that work on your guitar technique. The first game is similar to jet pack joyride, but based solely on how loud you strum the strings and control the volume. The next game is like the old Root Beer Tapper game but you have to hit the right string to "shoot" down the right area. I had trouble with volume and finding strings and these were fantastic ways to practice. It includes high scores, mini achievements, and online rankings. I also tried the slide arcade and a duck shooting game that helps practice slides, frets and strings. There are many more arcade games that I have not tried because I don't know the concept (ie: bending) yet. Some games are more fun than others, but the fun and rewarding way to practice is top notch.

The main thing this does not do is teach you to play guitar by reading sheet music. That was not important to me, but worth noting.

We try and limit video game play for our kids, but this game is so educational that we bend the rules and let our kids play Rocksmith at times when they normally are not allowed to play games.

I highly recommend this game for anyone who wants to learn to play a real guitar for fun. It provides learning, fun, and a sense of accomplishment. It will provide our family many hours of fun time together.