The day has come when your imaginary guitar skills will be enough to rock a crowd like Zakk Wylde or strike sparks like Slash. All you need is an Oculus headset, an Unplugged Air Guitar, and a genuine love of hard rock.
Unplugged Air Guitar is a new Guitar Hero-style rhythm game for Friv2Online Studio with support for virtual hands technology. Yes, it does not require controllers. Moreover, it does not even support them if you play in the Oculus ecosystem. It is enough to have good lighting in the gaming area, get rid of the sleeves and thoroughly wipe the sensors.
As such, there is no plot in Unplugged, but there is an educational disc How To Play, which will introduce you to the lead guitarist of the American glam metal band Steel Panther. Anotherway invited their guitarist "Satchel" to play the role of a musician who was trapped in a poster and now has to teach the player how to play the electric guitar.
The charismatic and funny Satchel will tell and demonstrate exactly how to control the virtual guitar in Unplugged so exhaustively that by the fourth or fifth performance you can easily master the medium, and even high difficulty. By the way, the friv game is localized into Russian and subtitles are provided.
The process is as follows: in your dominant hand (you can choose it at the beginning of the game), you hold a plectrum and hit the strings with it, the other hand walks along the neck, from which several lines stretch into the distance, and crawl along them... let's call them “chords”. When a chord is approaching the guitar, the hand on the fretboard should be in the appropriate position, and the leader should strike the strings.
Each chord is made up of one or more colors, let's call them "strings". The fingers sliding along the fingerboard are painted in the same colors to make it easier for the player to figure out which strings need to be conditionally clamped. These are two key mechanics of playing Unplugged: the position of the hand and the number of fingers on the fretboard must match the chords of the song in order for the guitarist to score and please the audience.
As complexity grows, Unplugged offers additional techniques. For example, tapping, when to register a chord you will need to avoid hitting the strings with a plectrum, or viscous vibrato, when you have to hold the strings and rock the neck to score points, or imitation of a guitar solo, where you need to finger as quickly as possible.
From time to time, the chords will flash, hiding until the last which strings need to be clamped, and sometimes modifier cubes will appear. You need to move the headstock along them to activate some kind of passive bonus, like doubling combo points or the time dilation effect.
The counter on the left side of the screen will tell you how well you are doing as a rock guitarist, whether you are gaining combo points or vice versa - losing the interest of the audience. And yes, you will have to perform in front of a faceless, but demanding audience on a stage flooded with spotlights. Even without a counter, you will understand the mood of the crowd: the enthusiastic audience breaks the voices, and your instrument shines brightly. But if you screw up a lot, you'll get pelted with tomatoes and kicked off the stage.
At the end of each performance, the guitarist can show the crowd a goat and thus earn new fans and admirers who will shower you with underwear. If you catch a couple, you'll earn extra points to climb as high as you can in the world Unplugged VR guitarist rankings. By the way, you can make faces in this way during the performance, if you have earned enough bonus points.
Excellent integration of motion capture technology. Moreover, for VR-devices there are not so many games with such. Unplugged Air Guitar perfectly reads the position of the hands, allows you to interact with the environment by touching and waving, and the guitar has a virtual lever with which you can adjust the position of the deck before the performance, as if adjusting the guitar on a strap.
Decent selection of hits. Unplugged Air Guitar has five levels of collections - from simple songs to the most complex ones. Garbage, The Hives, The Offspring, Jet, Weezer, Ozzy Osbourne. Dozens of licensed tracks are available, ranging from punk and grunge to hard rock and heavy metal.
Great rock atmosphere: acoustics, scenery, well-chosen visuals. Completing challenges for each of the records unlocks a new performance venue, and the number of fans is the local currency, which can be used to purchase instruments for the collection. Playing masterfully in Unplugged is very difficult, but that's how it should be when dealing with electric guitar and stage. But every approving exclamation from the audience seems well deserved.
