Thursday, September 27, 2012

A Whole New Rocksmith Journey Begins (I'll Never Back Up My Profile Again!) Events 1-5

Actually, I guess this will be my second "whole new Rocksmith journey" since Bass was really a whole new journey that I started a month ago.

My newest journey is not by choice, and it all started when my Rocksmith game save data file was corrupted or lost. Ironically, this happened when I decided to back up my game save data to a flash drive. Which I will probably never attempt again.

I had just crossed over to Level 10 - Super Elite Guitarist with 15,000,905 RSP. I'd noticed that loading my saved data was taking longer these days. Seemed like a good time to make a back-up copy. Just in case.

Since I'm not really a "gamer" - remember, I bought an XBox specifically to play Rocksmith - I really had no idea how to back up my game save data. The XBox system isn't very intuitive when it comes to backing up.

If they asked me, I'd say there should be a whole separate box in the System menu section called "Back Up Game Save Data." But, there isn't. You have to navigate to the System "tab" on the main menu and then go to "Storage." You click on Storage and then pick which storage device you want to browse. Game save data is buried in a list somewhere in there. Depending on how you navigate to it, you might not even have an option to copy the data. To make a long story short, what I ended up doing the first time I tried was to actually MOVE all of the data on my HDD to my flash drive. That would be fine except that moving data is not the same as backing it up. I didn't set out to move the data. I set out to back it up. When I realized my mistake, I moved everything back to the HDD.

Eventually I figured out how to COPY files to the flash drive, but I probably won't be doing that again at any point in the foreseeable future. My experience has given me little faith in backing up my game data.

Somewhere in the process of moving the data off of and back on to my HDD, MY game save data just disappeared. The file itself was still there, but there didn't appear to be anything IN the file any more.

When I started Rocksmith after moving all the data back onto the HDD, I was taken through the whole right-hand/left-hand, pick-a-guitar-headstock, sound-check process - as though I had never played Rocksmith before! I backed out immediately without saving. Or at least I tried to back out without saving anything because I didn't want to over-write my data file. Just in case my old data was still there. Pretty sure it's not.

My son's Rocksmith data was fine. It just seemed to be MY data that disappeared. Same thing for Halo Reach (which came with the system, so I've played it some). All MY game progress - gone. Everybody else's game data, fortunately, still fine. Somehow the contents of my game save data file just went away.

I'm really pissed off about the whole thing. I'm pissed at the arcane process MS has for backing up game data in the XBox. That's some bullshit way to do a back-up on a consumer game console. I'm also pissed XBox requires a dedicated flash drive; I had to buy a whole new flash drive just so I could end up losing all of my game data! I'm kinda pissed that Ubisoft didn't put something in Rocksmith that allows players to back-up their data from within the software, but it's not their job to "fix" MS's crappy process. And, I'm pissed at myself for no specific reason except that it was my idea to try this whole damn back-up thing in the first place. But, now I know better.

After trying just about everything I could possibly think of to find my game data, I finally gave up and resigned myself to starting all over. So, I'm back to the very beginning, playing Satisfaction and Next Girl and unlocking all the tones and pedals and guitars and venues that I unlocked months ago. I started over last night. I'm really, really pissed off that I've also got to restart my bass journey, too.

Last night I did my soundcheck and unlocked The Power House, my first venue. From there, I qualified songs for and performed 5 (that's right - FIVE) events. I got a double encore on my first event and unlocked Space Ostrich (which ended up being my encore song on the third event). But, despite kicking ass on pretty much everything including encores, I didn't get another double encore in the next four events. Weird. A topic which deserves a whole blog post of its own.

So, after one night, here's where I stand:

Level 4 - Local Headliner with 1,878,952 RSP.
Completed 5 Events, 20 songs (including encores) - see progress tables on separate blog page
Preparing for Event 6 at 363 Brennan.
Unlocks:
  Songs - Space Ostrich
  Techniques - Shifting, Sustains, Hammer-ons/Pull-offs, Slides, Palm Mutes, Bends, Double Stops, Tremelos, Power Chords, Chords, Harmonics (Done.)
  Games - Ducks, Superducks
  Tones - Stomp Box Blues, Valencia Fuzz, Sangre Saccharine, CroMagnon Drive, Pick-up Blues, Seattle Flannel, Punch Drunk, Pin Pusher, Regal Delay, Tenor Mascara, Golden Throne, Coy Koi
  Pedals - AutoFilter, Rotavibe, Tape Delay, Choppah, Vibrato
  Venues - The Power House, The Mouse Hole, The Low Down, Velvet Club, 363 Brennan
  Guitars - Epi Limited Ed Wilshire, Epi '58 Korina Flying V, Epi '64 Casino, Epi '56 Les Paul Gold Top, Epi G310 Vintage White
 
Also got a new XBox Live Achievement - Just Awesome. No idea what that was for. . . over 100k?


2 comments:

  1. I saw your post on the forum. I don't have an xbox, so i am of no help.

    On this play thru, are you just going try anything specific or just play the events to get back to where you were?

    Trying (and failing) to download the PC version right now.

    Tim

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  2. I'm approaching this restarted journey like I was doing the bass journey. Instead of trying to get every song up to 70,000 points before events, I'm just doing the minimum qualifying score and playing events right away. But, because I already agonized over most of the songs and worked my butt off to get them over 70,000 the first time through, I'm getting songs back up to 70k pretty quickly. So, I'm not sure my new approach makes much difference. We'll see how it plays out, I guess.

    I didn't realize the PC version was already out there for download! Let me know how that works out. I'd love to post something on here about the PC version, but I really wasn't planning to run out and buy it. For one thing, I can't imagine trying to see the RSNH on a tiny computer monitor. I guess I could play at my desk or use a laptop and headphones. . . that might actually be pretty cool on trips or whatever.

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