Rocksmith

Rocksmith is a music video game produced by Ubisoft, released in October 2011 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 platforms in North America.

In the normal game mode, playing with a song, the player is presented with a display that shows a representation of the guitar's fretboard, divided by numbered frets and colored strings.

A core feature of normal play is the game's ability to adjust the note density – effectively the difficulty – of the current song based on the player's performance to that point.

[15] The studio was able to acquire Game Tank and the Guitar Rising technology, bringing aboard Parks and his lead designer Nick Bonardi as Ubisoft employees.

The Ubisoft studio team of about 60 were led by Paul Cross and Nao Higo, and set about to transform the Guitar Rising into a retail product over a period of about two years.

[15] Developer Jason Schroeder referred to the state of Guitar Rising as a "PC tech demo of note recognition" and set about redesigning the HUD so that non-guitarists could understand the game better.

[17] In addition, there are 6 tracks from the developers that are unlockable in the journey mode when double encores are reached in a set:[citation needed] Rocksmith was released in the US on October 18, 2011, to mostly positive reviews.

[20] Curtis Silver of Wired gave the game a 9/10, praising the intuitive nature of the note track and wrote that "Rocksmith is an amazing learning tool for the guitar.

"[23] Adam Dulge of PlayStation Universe praised the game and gave it an 8.5: "Rocksmith is an absolute must buy for anyone slightly interested in learning how to truly rock.

"[25] However, Jordan Mallory of Joystiq gave the game a mediocre 2+1⁄2/5 on the day of its release, stating that "...Rocksmith fails as both an educational platform and as a rhythm title, despite its groundbreaking technological foundations.

"[26] Ben Kuchera of Ars Technica said the game is "not terrible", but that it "fails as a way to learn guitar" due to lag, the automated difficulty adjustments, and the way the unlock system is implemented.

[30] Ubisoft subsequently filed a patent-infringement case against Yousician, a mobile app aimed to teach users how to play musical instruments which used similar principles as Rocksmith.

In Rocksmith , players are shown a virtual fretboard with colored notes (represented as colored rectangles associated to specific guitar strings) on numbered lanes (corresponding to frets) to indicate what they should play on the guitar. The top portion of the screen graphically shows how the player has performed on the previous sections of the song and at what difficulty (the orange boxes), as well as the song's lyrics and the current score.