The Glade 4.0

Could be fun...

(For the youtube challenged, it's a Rockband/Guitar Hero type game, but uses a real electric guitar...)

Looks very cool. Will definitely be looking into this one.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Yeah man, anything that lets me play around with different styles and techniques and is fun, I'm in. I hope it's not 200 dollars or something ridiculous.

That looks awesome! Hopefully it works well.

I haven't looked at pricing. I think I saw that there are going to be two versions. One will be the game with the cable, and the other will come with a real-deal Epiphone Les Paul Jr.

I think they were estimating $300 for the guitar included version.

I have plenty of guitars so I will just get the basic version.

There seems to be a wide variety of songs included, and from the reviews I've read, the difficulty ranges from really easy single note stuff, to really fast, complex stuff, including bends, slides, harmonics, hammer ons, pull offs, and apparently even some tapping stuff etc..

This would really go a long ways towards getting me to play stuff I wouldn't normally try. And I always have a guitar within arms reach when I watching the TV, so this will fit in nicely.

Pre-order page is up on gamestop, 79$ bucks (so basically 59 plus a 20$ adapter).

Definitely interested....

So this game will not use some mockup guitar designed specifically for the game, rather it can use any electric?

More interested now. Great reason for me to drag my electric out once again.

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This must be Thursday. I could never get the hang of Thursdays.

Hopefully it won't suck. Or, to quote someone on youtube:

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Here's the setlist so far.

I can count on the fingers of one hand the songs out of that list I would be actually interested to play. And even of those, there are more marquee songs that could have been chosen. Let's face it, if I wanted to play a song featuring the guitar work of Eric Clapton, "Sunshine of Your Love" is not the first one I would pick.

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It will use any electric guitar. Presumably even an acoustic electric. The adapter converts the analog signal from the guitar to whatever is required for the game.

If I'm not mis-interpreting what I'm seeing on the video's, the game will be able to detect slides, bends, harmonics, tapping, and hopefully muting..

I'm definitely interested. Like everyone else, I just hope it doesn't suck.

heh.. sweet home alabama is an interesting choice. It's obviously a great guitar song. The problem is its not one guitar solo, there are half a dozen or so. Even the live version usually features three or more guitars. It'll be interesting to see how they interpret that.

And yea, I'm lukewarm about the set list, but like I said, as long as playing is fun, and there isn't any frustrating signaling delay, I can live with it. If it becomes popular maybe they'll be able to justify licensing more/better tunes.

I don't expect it to be revolutionary, but I think being able to play my own guitar makes it appealing (if it's well done).

I think I read or heard somewhere that is has an "Amp Sim" mode or something, where you can just plug in and putz around... That'll be interesting to see as well.

Haha I already know how to play several of those. Icky thump should be interesting to learn, it's kind of insane.

This idea is so obvious, it's a wonder we got this many iterations of GH and Rock Band before this came out. All it has to do is real time spectrum analysis of the signal from the pups and bingo.

Given how accurately the little Shazam app on my phone can id tracks, I would say the software part of this game should be pretty damned accurate since Shazam works on the essentially the same principle.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

I picked this up today.

I've only played with it for an hour or so, and so far my opinion is mixed.

I had serious audio sync issues playing over an HDMI connection. I ended up switching to component with analog audio and it improved, but there is still some lag I haven't been able to tune out (so far).

The game takes some getting used to. I only played a couple of the beginner songs in single note (vs Chord) mode, and after a few practice attempts to get used to the delay, I was able to get through them pretty easily.

There are some 'Guitarcade' games you unlock as you progress. One of the, called "Dawn of the Chordead" is actually a pretty good workout for playing chords up and down the neck.

So, my very quick initial impression is that the fun factor seems tad low (so far), and Im not sure how appealing it will be to the masses. As a guitar player, I appreciate being able to plug in my own instrument, but the lag is painful, and kinda takes some of the fun out of it.

I need to spend more time going through the progression before I can say much about the gameplay.

I'd suggest if you aren't sending your audio to a dedicated sound system, or directly to headphones (i.e you are sending digital audio to your flatpanel TV for processing), expect some serious latency.

One of the issues is that Guitar Hero and Rock Band do not necessarily translate to people with the wherewithal to play a real guitar, so I can understand why it's taken so long.

Something else to keep in mind - running real-time spectrum analysis and doing it quickly are two totally different animals. I don't doubt that the Xbox 360 or the Playstation 3 both have the guts to do it, but I don't think either machine is actually hard-wired for it. This isn't an insurmountable hurdle, but it may not be worth the effort depending on how many units you think you'll move.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

We bought this and my wife, who does not play guitar, loves it. She is not loving the hand cramps and finger callouses, but I assured her that would get better over time.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

What kind of guitar is she playing?...

One thing I've discovered about this game is that the setup of the guitar is pretty important. If the guitar doesn't intonate (play in tune) down the neck, the game wont recognize the note when you play it. My own personal guitars, that are very well intonated down the neck, still have problems with the system recognizing the notes on frets higher than 15 or so. You can find videos on youtube explaining how to adjust intonation using an electronic tuner.

Also, if the action is high, when you press the strings down, it raises the pitch, which can also cause problems. And if you use light or extra light gauge strings, especially in combination with a heavy/strong grip, and high frets, it can also cause the game to not recognize the note when the string bends behind the fret.

One of the biggest mistakes beginners make is gripping the neck/strings too hard. On an electric guitar, learn to use as light a touch as you can and still fret the note. Good guitar instructors give exercises that specifically teach this to improve technique.

It's my old Ibanez electric that I bought back in high school for 80 bucks.

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Yeah I thought guitar hero was/is somewhat interesting, but If this had came out first i wouldn't have shelled out $300 for it.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Damn, I really really really want to like this game, and I'm trying really really hard..

Unfortunately, more negative review input from me...

The navigation is painfully slow. I was just trying to run through a couple of the challenges, and because it makes you loop back through the entire menu, with loading on several screens (i.e. there is no 'try again' option immediately at the end of the challenge), it takes painfully long.

There is too much loading, and it's too slow. I don't need to see the tuning screen time I enter an event or challenge. Make it an option.

The narrator's voice makes me want to stab myself in the face with a guitar pick repeatedly...

Being a Guitar/Music themed game, there should be some interesting, lively tunes to listen to while I'm waiting impatiently for various things to take too long to load...

Can you do an HDD install to help loading times?

Note: If you've already done this and are still experiencing the issue, then even more massive fail on the devs' part.

It's installed to the HDD already. It's not so much that the loading times are long, it's that there are so many, and the navigation is.. inefficient...

I was doing the techniques challenges (slides in this case).. the type of thing you might want to repeat a few times to improve your score, or just to get practice at it. It should have an option to "Try Again" immediately on completion, without having to go back through several menus, and the tuning screen. Any enthusiasm you might have to improve a score or get better at a chord progression or some other technique, for me anyway, is stifled by the idle time navigating back through the menus and tuning screens, which are painfully slow to load, in order to start over again...

I moved my 360 to a the HDMI connection on a 24" computer monitor (video only, duh) and connected the audio to my computer speaker aux input.

This reduced the lag enough to where the game is playable.

I have found a half dozen reproducable bugs that require the game to be reset (drop back to the dashboard) to get out of. The user interface is littered with logic bugs.

The more I play, the more I'm disappointed in the automatic difficulty settings logic. If you have one good sequence by blind luck, the game immediately goes straight to 'insane' difficulty settings, and it stays that way forever (for that section) unless you manually reset the difficulty, which is a global reset (you can't do it for one song).

The game has its moments where it's enjoyable, unfortunately, they are sparsely scattered around amongst a poorly designed user interface and (for me) marginal content.

So much potential.. such a bummer...

So, not a recommendation?

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Well, you might try to find some other (non-biased) reviews out there and get more opinions.

I had really high hopes for this, and am just really disappointed. It could very well be that there are others who don't hold the same opinions.

I think the content might contribute to my overall negative opinion. There are only 3 or 4 songs that I care to listen to on the play list. If you like the songs, that may help.

Being a guitar player, I have a fondness for music that has prominent guitar work in it. Most of the music chosen for the game is not what I would consider 'guitar' music. They might have a nice rhythm line, or a few nice licks, but I don't find much of it very 'interesting' from a guitar standpoint.

In fact, in my years of playing guitar, I've only ever learned one of the songs from the game, and that was 'Satisfaction', which is kinda like Smoke on the Water in terms of cliche guitar songs.

Maybe there will be some nice add-on material later, after they get some feedback.

Also, watching and reading their promotional stuff, they seem really proud of all of the amp, speaker cab, and effect combo's you can unlock. This doesn't interest me at all. In my personal playing, there are maybe three or four 'patches' I use to achieve the sounds I like. They vary from mild to moderate basic distortion ala the "U.K. blues" sound. I haven't really played around with that aspect of the game, because it doesn't interest me. So if that's your thing it might be worth a try.

Im not sure how rental sites like gamefly work with games that require hardware, but if "rental" is an option, you might give that a go first, before you commit $70 to it.