The You Rock Guitar is so cool. In fact, it could be one of the ultimate gifts of the season for Guitar Heroes, Rock Band members and real life musicians alike. This is not just a digital guitar and it is not just a game controller. It is both, and more. It is so cool that it took me months of playing around with it to be prepared for this review.
The You Rock Guitar Basics
The You Rock Guitar features a rubberized fret board with micro-switches underneath the rubber and raised areas like real
guitar strings.This gives you the feel of a real guitar but without having to press down as hard to play the notes you want. It is a full-sized fret board because you can play the You Rock Guitar just like a real guitar. On the top side, when playing right-handed, there are colored tags so you know where to play when you are using it as a game controller. Unfortunately, there are not any on the other side and I like to play left-handed some of the time (I’m ambidextrous). It would be nice to either have the frets themselves colored or have colored stickers on both sides.
Now, as most game controllers have a strum bar, the You Rock Guitar has actual strings in the strum area. So it’s like playing a real guitar. The strings are actually thin metal wires that correspond to the standard six-string guitar and the frets on the board. This allows you to play your games with a more realistic guitar feel as well as use the You Rock Guitar like a standard digital guitar. Other standard guitar features are a Whammy bar so you can bend it like the pros and a palm mute bar which is used in both game playing (special power) and guitar playing (note muting of course).
The guitar has two modes: Game and Music. Obviously you use the one that pertains to what you want to do. When you want to use it as a game controller you need a GameFlex cartridge which connects the unit to your game console (PS3, Wii). They haven’t got an Xbox 360 version just yet but I’m told they’re working on it. If you want to use the You Rock Guitar with your PC it’s as simple as plugging in a USB cable. However, I had some issues with finding games that would recognize the YRG as an actual game controller. None of my Steam-based games seemed able to see it. Now they’re not actually pushing it as a PC-game controller, but I thought that since it used a standard USB interface it would have been readily found. The PC does call it a game controller, it’s just that the games wouldn’t recognize it.
However, the You Rock Guitar has an upgradeable firmware system so hopefully over time they’ll manage to get some new functionality into it over time. I would really like to just have one guitar controller that I could use on all of my gaming platforms and unplug and use as a standard guitar. That is about the only major drawback on the guitar (there’s one more I’ll get to later).
