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!

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.

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.