Archive for March, 2014

Now that I have never to play Rocksmith again (I have been doing anyway, but I do not have to which is a big psychological difference), it is probably time to express my overall thoughts on the game. As Sherlock Holmes would suggest, it might be best to know the worst of each other and see if that is tolerable than being sold on the shiny veneer.

Here is what I found annoying:

Automatic difficulty
This is not perfect. Take American Idiot. I did it with the full chords and got 58% mastery. But then the next time I played it, it had downgraded me to single notes. Not even the two note in-between stage, just all the way down. I hit 95% accuracy, but only got 28% mastery. Why would it do this?

At the end of a song a voice tells you how you did. But it is a bit silly. For example, if you do something really easy it will say “brilliant performance” even though you have not improved your skill. Fine I guess, it was pretty accurate. But when the game makes it harder and your accuracy drops to 70%, even though you might move your mastery of the song up 10% it will still say something far less encouraging like “needs more practice”. Again, true, but you have just got to the higher difficultly, what does it expect?

Learning
The lessons are of very little use. They are just too difficult. I cannot do the riffs they introduce – even if it is about something else. For example it might be a hammer-on lesson, but you have to jump around the fret board at the same time. This would be fine except the game is throwing me this stuff in the songs, so I have to go look it up elsewhere.

It cannot tell you what you are doing wrong. Take bends for example. I almost always miss my bends (apparently). But I do not know what I am doing wrong. Too much? Too little? Wrong pattern? Wrong speed? Oddly, on some songs I get “miss” followed immediately by “late” and these only come up after I have finished playing my bend.

Documentation
The chord book included in game is not much use. Nine times of out ten, I cannot find the chord I am looking for. I am fairly sure it is not in there. Of course there are a huge variety of chords, but it is not difficult to include lots of them. If you can build an entire game, you can stick a few more chord diagrams in there – indeed they must be in the same somewhere.

Bugs
It crashes from time to time.

The recommended song list is strange. At first, once I played a song it would move down the queue and give me some different recommendations. Then, 45 days in, it started making me play a song twice before it would move it down the list. No indication as to why.

Also the R.E.M. song pack appeared in my list, even though I had not bought it. This could be a commercial feature rather than a bug, but it only appears randomly. One time I turn it on and they are there, the next time they are gone, the next time they are back, etc.

Conclusion
I would totally recommend Rocksmith. It has its problems, but there is nothing else out there like it to compare to so they might be really difficult issues to overcome. Ultimately, it kept me engaged for the whole two months. The hardest part of learning an instrument, indeed some research suggests the only part, is committing the time to learning. Rocksmith managed to get me to do that.

Apparently, Paddy Power think he is not.

Last month, I was invited to give a talk to Leeds Atheist Society about my experiences of evangelism on campus during my time university. There was a good turnout for what you would usually expect at the society these days and I found it a most enjoyable experience speaking at the group I had founded all those years ago.

Recently I started guitar lessons in an attempt to improve the speed I am progressing at.

My teacher, Chris, who spookily has the exact same initials as me, was immediately able to start improving my playing. For example, I can now get to the end of Green Day’s Oh Love without my hand falling off in pain. That is nice.

Time will tell if it is worth the investment but after my first two lessons I am feeling reasonably positive.

For too long has the lack of a cooked breakfast after Wendy House haunted our steps. No more I say, no more!

For the February meeting of the Humanist Society of West Yorkshire we had a talk on highwaymen. The first half looked at the practice in general and the second half focused on Dick Turpin and how he ended up in Yorkshire. With some myth-debunking along the way too!

What was a little confusing though is that the speaker the last recorded case was in the nineteenth century. Has nobody been robbed then? Because my understanding was that it still happened…

Last week we ventured into The Packhorse for a few beverages. I have traditionally given it a birth as it seems unlikely that you would get a seat given it is a lovely traditional pub right in the centre of town. However, it turns out we were able to accommodate our large party (eventually) even on a Friday night.

The food is alright too, as I describe in the Leeds Restaurant Guide.