Rocksmith is ready to make music in North American retail

According to Ubisoft, you can plug any real guitar with a standard 1/4" input jack using the Rocksmith Real Tone Cable. Developed exclusively for Rocksmith, the cable turns the guitar's signal from analog to digital, which means that what you're playing on your real guitar can for the first time be recognized by a video game.

Time flies. It seems like only yesterday, Activision was announcing that it would be retiring the Guitar Hero brand--an announcement that it later changed its mind about--and now today, you can walk into a store and pick up a copy of Rocksmith for PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360.

On the face of things, Rocksmith is the sort of game that the genre has needed for some time, the sort of thing that Harmonix was fumbling toward with the "super" guitar feature of Rock Band 3. Ubisoft, however, is going all the way. The hook? You can play it with a real guitar.

According to Ubisoft, you can plug any real guitar with a standard 1/4" input jack using the Rocksmith Real Tone Cable. Developed exclusively for Rocksmith, the cable turns the guitar's signal from analog to digital, which means that what you're playing on your real guitar can for the first time be recognized by a video game. You can pick up a bundle for $199.99 that includes an Epiphone Les Paul Jr. guitar, along with the cable.

As for the game itself, Rocksmith apparently adjusts automatically to your skill level (which is non-existent in my case, if we're going to talk about real music and not the stuff I've hammered out on my plastic Activision guitar). Players can choose lead, rhythm and combo guitar compositions, which Ubisoft suggests--correctly, I would think--will inspire players to keep playing even without the aid of the Rocksmith software.

The full list of songs you'll be able to play includes "Sunshine of Your Love" (Cream), "Use Somebody" (Kings of Leon), "Sweet Home Alabama" (Lynyrd Skynyrd), "Unnatural Selection" (Muse), "Breed" (Nirvana), "High and Dry" (Radiohead), "Outshined" (Soundgarden) and quite a few others, though it pains me to admit that I don't recognize better than half the songs... or if I do, I'm not impressed.

With that said, it's difficult not to be impressed by what Ubisoft is attempting here. Hopefully, the gimmick works and marks a transition in the genre. It would be nice for the plastic guitar jokes to end and for gamers to get something more out of their rhythm games than just callouses and an artificial sense of accomplishment.

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Staff article by Jason Venter (October 18, 2011) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.