Chris Worfolk's Blog

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I was about to come on and bitch about how it is impossible to complete any of the bosses and you just get stuck for hours. Then I beat the boss on Return of Castle Chordead. Good times. I am still stuck on the boss on Scale Warriors though. I was a little disappointed to see the Castle Chordead scales just re-use the same virtual world for the other scales too.

I reached 50 hours today, which is not too far off the level required to complete the 60-day challenge. Of course I have been doing it for 18 days, but one hour a day for 60 days equals 60 hours. So I should effectively be nearing the end of the challenge in equivalent hours.

I still cannot play the guitar. Of course there is always the chance it will all fall into place at the last minute, but this seems very unlikely. I still struggle to pick out the right note (without looking) and chords are hit and miss. Even though I feel I am making progress, and I might be, I have seen what is to come and I am a million miles away from it.

That is not even the song I wanted to learn. I was looking for information on Cold Company by Minus the Bear, which is way harder.

I actually ended up on that video because I wanted to know how you were able to play fret 19 and then hammer-on on fret 12. My hand simply is not big enough to do that. Turns out that you have to use both hands. That makes sense now because the notes are taps. But as I have not got to the taps lesson yet that did not occur to me. I do not know why it gives me taps if it does not explain them.

Last night I got an email stating that the takeaway order I had placed in June had now been completed.

An order you recently placed on our website has had its status changed.

The status of order #153 is now Completed

Order Details

Date Placed: 11th Jun 2013

I knew it felt like a massive wait at the time…

Quite a frustrating day. I am stuck on the boss on level 6 of Scale Warriors. Between the time I spent yesterday and the 45 minutes straight I spent today, I have now been trying to beat him for an hour. I had to give up in the end before I became too stressed out.

There are also some bugs in the game. Sometimes it does not clear the highlighted box for the note you are supposed to play, so when it pops up the next one there are then two boxes. There is also the possibility that it is highlighting the same box it already had highlighted, and thus you could miss it while waiting for another box to light up.

I could go and play Return to Castle Chordead, but I am stuck on a boss on that too.

I then went and played Cold Company and realised that basically I need to do the entire song on Riff Repeater in slow motion. It quickly jumps between E and B, so right now I am just aiming to pluck the B string in the time I have between the sections of E strings. It also has hammer-ons on different strings to the notes I am currently playing. Luckily, it cannot tell the difference between a regular note and a tap, so it does not pick me up on that.

Finally my session finished when the game crashed on the results screen.

One thing I have noticed is that Rocksmith cannot tell the difference between certain things. Take accents for example. It does not know, or at least does not call you on, whether you have played a note extra hard. So when I did the practice track I pretty much did all the notes the same and it gave me 100%.

I have also noticed that in the videos, they tend to finger the string as low down the fret as possible. Indeed, when you are on the first fret, if you do not finger it at the very bottom, Rocksmith will think you are playing an open string and say you missed the note.

Another unfortunate reality of Rocksmith is that you get worse before you get better. At first you sound okay, because it is just giving you one note at a time. Then, as you move on, it gives you chords that you invariably miss at first, sounding like a cat being strangled.

The skin on the end of my fretting hand is starting to build up, which I suppose is a good thing, but it makes my fingers more slippery on the strings.

My last thing to moan about is the automatic difficultly adjustment. When you start it replaces the chords with a single note. I can do this. Then as you get better it replaces them with the actual chords. These I have not mastered yet.

The problem is that when I miss all the chords it replaces them with the single notes again. So I then have to do the song a few times and nail it to get the chords back. Or go into riff repeater and manually set it to a higher difficultly level.

The fingers on my fretting hand are starting to show the scars of war.

I played Scale Racer for the first time today. It is an okay game, but I think I prefer Scale Warriors. I played that too and managed to complete level three, as well as another level on Return to Castle Chordead. Now I am stuck on a boss that looks suspiciously like the Devil in Tenacious D: The Pick of Destiny.

Following Jan’s recent comments on my posts, I decided to give Blitzkrieg Bop a go on score attack. I managed to complete it on both easy and medium. I cannot quite finger the chords in time yet though, so I have not been able to complete it on hard. Will have to keep working.

For the December event of Sunday Assembly Leeds we did a theme of “festivities” including “Santa is doing his best”.

Two weeks in.

I played Temple of Bends today, which is a technique game for bending strings (surprisingly). I find bends quite hard. I normally need to get three fingers on a string to make it work.

I made some good progress on the other games too. I set several new high scores on Ninja Slide and completed the second level of Return to Castle Chordead. I think that is probably a better game than Star Chords. The problem with Star Chords is that as you level up it gives you new chords, but not much chance to learn them. So now I am on level 3 or something, but I cannot remember, or go back to level 1 chords. With Castle Chordead, once you complete a level you can always go back to it and each level builds on your existing chords anyway.

There are still a few symbols I don’t really understand. I am going to try asking on the Ubisoft forums to see if anyone can tell me what lesson it is that I need to look at for them.

On Saturday we went to Tropical World. It was our last chance to go before the close for a month for refurbishment. The fact that we had not been for a year before that was irrelevant. We had to get there in time!

We made too much food. But not quite as much as we normally over-make…