Slash's Arcade Rocker app

The newest game is worth playing at despite anything though (especially at the $.99 price tag). Slash’s Arcade Rocker allows the guitar legend’s die hard fans to play along with three pre-loaded songs from Slash’s solo début album – By The Sword, Watch This and Doctor Alibi – as well as any Slash song in their music library (and not only Slash, just as in the regular AR you can play thousands of songs if they are in your iPod music library).

In addition to the music/rhythm game, the Slash Arcade Rocker app provides access to the latest news, blog, tour dates and other exclusive content from Slash’s official website, which was as well developed and is hosted by Ultimate-Guitar.com as part of its partnership with the guitarist.

“The Arcade Rocker iPhone app is one of the coolest apps I’ve seen yet,” said Slash. “I’m having a blast with it!”

The mobile version of Slash Arcade Rocker is available for iPhone/iPod touch/iPad users from the iTunes Store for $0.99 (a limited time offer). A free online version is available at slash.arcaderocker.com.

Don’t be greedy for a buck :) Share your thoughts in the comments if you buy the app!

So here we go, Slayer just entered the “app age” with the launch of Slayer: Pinball Rocks, a new pinball game app developed in conjunction with American Recordings/Columbia Records, Sony Music Entertainment and Gameprom.

Slayer: Pinball Rocks

“As a life-size pinball player, this looks so awesome,” said Slayer’s Kerry King. “It looks really fun and entertaining, with a shot of evil, and it could definitely keep me up all night with a few shots for myself…”

Slayer: Pinball Rocks should appeal to both long-time and new Slayer fans, as well as any pinball enthusiast, by giving gamers multi-ball play and tap-along mini-game, as well as cool visual elements like spinning razor blades, guitars, amps, concert lights, and a skull that eats your ball and spits it out through its eyeball. As you might have guessed, this is all accompanied by music courtesy of Slayer.

Slayer: Pinball Rocks is available worldwide for $2.99 from the App Store. The game includes original voiceovers from Slayer members as well as songs from Slayer’s latest American Recordings release, World Painted Blood.

This app has been developed by Gameprom, a company famous for its series of Pinball games for iPhone and iPad.

See a video of Slayer: Pinball Rocks below:

Have you tried this out? Thoughts?

In the Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion! app players embark on an adventure taking them through six districts in the game, each featuring the distinctive style of a band member. The master goal is to retrieve the band’s stolen music track – Blackbirds, an unreleased Linkin Park song made exclusively for the game. The song is unlocked upon completion of all missions inside the game (I’ve heard it doesn’t take that long to do it, which is logical).

Production on the game began more than a year ago, with the band (vocalists Mike Shinoda and Chester Bennington, drummer Rob Bourdon, guitarist Brad Delson, DJ Joe Hahn and bassist Dave “Phoenix” Farrell) working with Artificial Life, Inc. on various aspect of the game, such as storylines, gameplay, character design and music. Mike Shinoda designed the band members’ avatars and edited every line of dialogue.

The iPad app renders the adventure with HD graphics, and a user interface that has been redesigned to utilize the iPad’s larger screen.

Among the game’s highlights are original and 8-bit remixes of Linkin Park tracks including “New Divide,” “One Step Closer,” “In The End,” “Crawling,” “QWERTY,” “Hands Held High,” “Faint,” and “No More Sorrow.

Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion! game screenshot

Additional game features, according to the press release:

• Personalization of players’ avatars and apartments provide a unique community experience
• Non-player characters (NPCs) inhabit the world, adding drama to the gaming experience
• Shopping for virtual items with coins awarded by winning fights and completing missions
• Earning trophies for adding friends to the rebellion
• A news feed to stay up-to-date with Linkin Park
• Facebook and Twitter integration connecting millions of social network users worldwide

But the main feature of the app is probably that it’s not a rhythm based game!

For more details about Linkin Park 8-Bit Rebellion! visit this website. And check out the trailer below:

On a side note, don’t forget to enter our latest giveaway for a chance to win 1,2,3’s colored Confetti 7″ vinyl for simply “liking” the Dotted Music Facebook page!

Now, this links to the internet fairly simply. It starts with the computer link. You load your mobile musical device, or MMD, with whatever music you enjoy, through your computer. This is either done through a specific media player, or just through copy and pasting folder to folder. The internet comes in to play here through the availability of music through it. Before the internet, there was no reliable method by which to load yours MMDs, so there was no real need for them, and this is a fairly worrying fact.

Photo credit: weheartit.com

You’ve been able to buy CDs for a long time. Admittedly, not as long as vinyl or tape, but it’s a good trade off. Since the development of technology reached the point that CDs could be ripped onto your PC, MMDs have been under development to design, create and make profit from. However, they were nowhere near as popular before broadband internet and free, fast, illegal mp3 downloads became common. Being able to listen to a track on the move made particular tracks much more desirable. Something that you’ve heard on the radio is something that you might go out and buy, but it’s less likely that you’ll buy it if it’s something that you won’t listen to often. Being able to listen to it in the back and forth between point A and point B has convinced people that, instead of merely wanting it, they need that track to be available.

There’s also a certain danger when it comes to listening to music on the move. After all, your ears are already under complete distraction, so you can’t hear what’s coming behind you. You are so consumed with your chosen distraction that you’ve lost interest in the safety. This is exactly the same as the moral implications when it comes to track downloading. You’re so absorbed in the smaller picture that you don’t even know that there’s a bigger one to overshadow it.

The money is obviously made with the sales of MMDs, but with iPods in particular, there are other avenues. With an iPod comes a copy of the media player iTunes. This is a clear advertisement of Apple software, even on a Microsoft operating system. In addition, iTunes software brings several other types of software with it, all of which has paid money to Apple in order to have the advertisement. Having their software installed, alongside iTunes, onto as many computers as possible has no viable downside when people are proven to use the product.

Without a doubt, the internet has pushed the advertising and development of MMDs, as well as offering them additional financial possibilities. You can never really doubt how useful these little things are in travel, but it’s also fairly clear that the distraction that they offer have downsides too. Most people might swear by them without a question, but in reality it’s yet another accessory that the internet has made essential.

Tom Colohue is a fiction writer and music instructor from Blackpool, England. Though his main works are in the realms of fantasy, he also writes modern fiction for multiple websites, as well as theoretical and practical music lessons for magazines.

Read also: The Effects Of The Internet: Contract Giveaways, The Effects Of The Internet: “Making It”, The Effects Of The Internet: Music Distribution

By the way, just as with our Arcade Rocker game, you (precious Dotted Music readers) hear about this project first.

What is UGT?

Ultimate Guitar Tabs is an easy and convenient application for viewing guitar and bass tablature and chords. What differs it from similar apps in the App Store is that this is the only mobile application giving you an unlimited and licensed access to the world’s largest database of tabs from Ultimate-Guitar.com. Everything is legal. And it’s relatively cheap, you can buy the app for just $1.99.

Here are the main features to get some of you hooked, hopefully:

• Simple Search. Find Tabs quickly by entering artist name or song title.
• Advanced Search tool. You can search for Tabs by specifying Tab type (guitar Tabs, chords, bass Tabs), part of the song (intro, solo, chorus), difficulty level, tuning, and rating.
• Favorites. Add any Tab to your favorites to make them available for offline browsing.
• Tab Packs. Collections of pre-selected Tabs that are preloaded into the application. Tab Packs are based on skills level (Easy, Medium, Advanced), music genres (Rock, Metal, Punk), and special occasions (Love songs, Xmas songs). Tab Packs are frequently updated.
• Top 100 Tabs list for each Tab type (Guitar, Bass, Chords or overall).
• Auto-scroll feature. View Tablature in the text viewer using the handy Auto-Scroll functionality – The App will scroll Tabs for you!
• Portrait and Landscape modes are available. You can scale Tabs too.

Here Come The Screenshots!

Share your thoughts! Found any bugs, glitches, or just have an idea on how to improve the app? Please let me know via the contact form or in the comments below.

You’ve heard it right, Arcade Rocker is a music/rhythm game in the spirit of Guitar Hero, Rock Band, Jam Legend, and even Tap Tap Revenge. How are we (disclosure: Ultimate Guitar USA, LLC) going to revolutionize the music gaming industry with such a banal idea, you ask? Well, I told you only the very basics of the concept.

Arcade Rocker

Arcade Rocker is a game that lets you rock out with any (ok, not literally any) song in your personal music collection. Let an excerpt from our press release bluntly speak for me:

No longer are you limited to only playing the tiny selection of recordings that other music/rhythm game companies choose for you. Arcade Rocker puts you in charge of what recordings you jam with; directly on your PC or Mac you can choose and play music from your personal collection using the free Arcade Rocker Player.

This means that you are not offered to stream, download or upload anything (like in other games in this genre). The website already has game play data (note charts) for other 14,000 popular songs (with more being added each month), and all you have to do is to pick your favorite music, find the desired songs on the Arcade Rocker website, and play them in the built-in player/game. As you can see, the potential is huge.

The charts have been generated automatically, so some of them are not synched up with music the way we would like them too, and we know about this. The generation algorithms are being improved, and what is even cooler – soon we’ll announce the Arcade Rocker Editor, built to provide an easy way to customize the existing game play files and create your own (from any recording).

The website is free, and don’t require you to have a game console (you play with a keyboard).

Arcade Rocker iPhone

This is the spiciest part… Simultaneously with the web version, we have released Arcade Rocker for iPhone / iPod Touch, available as a free application (iTunes link), with Play Packs required in order to play any songs, and a $4.99 version (iTunes link) without any limitations.

Here are few screenshots to spice up your interest (more Arcade Rocker related reports coming soon):

Have you tried either web or iPhone version? Let me know your thoughts, any feedback is appreciated.

What can be described as a first generation of musician-branded apps is built mostly to provide fans with content like music streams, news, photos, tour dates and so on (e.g. the Alice In Chaince iPhone app, covered here earlier). Despite all the built-in standard social features, it is more of a one-way communication.

And what we see now is a growth of the number of really creative applications. Bands unite with young developers and big companies alike to create interactive apps with their music in it. They share samples from their songs and allow doing remixes directly on the mobile device, and that’s not all.

Let’s take a look at some of the most recent and most notable examples.

Beaterator

Rockstar Games’ Beaterator

Originally made for a PSP platform, Beaterator had been optimized for iPhone / iPod Touch and appeared in the App Store in December. Beaterator gives users access to a library of sounds, many constructed by Timbaland, with which to construct original songs.

The infamous producer is not the only author of the samples used in the app, but the whole application is build around his fatty (in a good way!) image.

GrooveMaker Series

This style-based series includes 11 applications to date, each allowing you to create songs in particular genres, from Reggae and Hip-Hop to Techno and Drum & Bass (!). This month the apps’ collection has surpassed the 500,000 downloads.

GrooveMaker allows for instantaneous control over 8 stereo loop tracks, making it possible to remix the included loop library of drums, bass, bass drums, lines, pads, percussion and effects. Its patented randomization feature allows musicians to generate a number of remixes on the fly “to produce millions of possible groove combinations.”

These apps are attached to music genres rather than artist names, but let’s see what we have in GrooveMaker Rock Ace… The rock edition of the application features guitar samples from Skunk Anansie‘s guitarist “Ace”. The multi-platinum rockers reunited and released a greatest hits album last year, so isn’t a branded iPhone app a nice addition to a “comeback”?

Jammit

This is something truly interesting. OEM Inc., the company behind Jammit, has created a product that uses the original master recordings of popular songs formatted with synced notation and the capability to rebalance the mix for easy learning and playing along.

I won’t be trying to explain how it works, better check out the demo video:

Is there a space for musician-branded versions of this app? You can guess yourself. Already available for purchasing are Sum 41 and White Zombie bundles, and few dozens collections (“70′s Rock”, “80′s Rock” etc.) The artist and song catalogs expand rapidly, which can be seen on their Artists page.

The only thing though, we know the masters are pricey. So each Jammit app containing three songs goes for $6.99.

What else?

The list doesn’t end here. There is also a number of artist-branded Tap Tap Revenge games and many other interesting things in the App Store.

Not only musicians, but their creations become closer to the listeners – this tendency is great.

If you want to add something, feel free to do it in the comments!

Black Gives Way To Blue album cover

The first one is Metallica Revenge, yet another Tapulous‘s Tap Tap creature, which feels like… any other Tap Tap: Revenge game! I was a bit surprised to see Metallica in this series to be honest, more big names joining the App Store race is definitely a good sign. But due to having little interest in this particular app, I will rather speak about another one: Alice In Chains’ Black Gives Way To Blue iPhone application.

It might seem that it’s just another promotional app, timed to an album release (well… it is), but there are still few noteworthy things about it.

1. The app has a literally full pack of features that this kind of apps should include these days, from song streams, music videos, news, and photos – to social networking and other nice stuff.
2. It has an impressive level of interactivity. You can not only share and comment anything you find in the app through Fan Wall posts, email, Facebook and Twitter, but also interact with artworks created for each of the tracks.

From what I’ve seen among a huge number of other bands’ apps, this one looks like a very self-sufficient application. Great to see the quality of what labels / musicians put into mobile promotions is getting better. This should mean that the next logical step will be designing more innovative applications. At least I hope so…

According to Mobile Crunch, the app was developed by a company named Mobile Roadie in partnership with Streetwise. Among the songs featured on the app is a lead single “Check My Brain,” which continues to hold the No. 1 spot on Billboard’s Top Rock Songs Chart. Black Gives Way To Blue is in stores now.

Check out the video demonstrating the app below. The application itself was made available in the store about an hour ago, but – total bummer – it is not available in the Russian iTunes Store… Hence I won’t be able to provide you with screenshots.