For my part, I care less about the branding. Those deals start and end; yesterday it was the "German Gain", today it's the Powerball; yesterday it was "Ampeg", today it's not; but it all sounds great both days. In recent years (perhaps especially in the higher-gain guitarospheres), amp-sim opinions are becoming about as polarized as opinions about real amps, with people asserting blindly that everything by a given manufacturer sucks or rules
but, IMO, the recent stuff from AmpliTube is very good, especially for the price, and we all know of "name" guitarists or bands who have used even the earlier versions on commercial records, so ... there could be no licensed branding or no artist tie-ins, and I'm sure the resultant models would get their jobs done.
Anyway, I spent a fair bit of time on the day of release messing around with the new amps and cabs. (I dived less into the pedals, except insofar as noting what was used where and how as I flipped through the various presets. Most of the discographies of the artists with AmpliTube collections are not really that well known to me
though they do have nice hardware toys that I'd like to try out.
So I can't tell anyone how much this will make them sound like Joe Satriani
but I can say there is very useful stuff here.
The
Satch VM (i.e. Marshall JVM410HJS) is very powerful and flexible -- just as the physical amp is clearly intended to be. It is really a bunch of amp models in one. I probably spent more time playing with it than with anything else, and I've barely scratched the surface. And once you start pairing it up with further cab models outside the Satch collection, the tonal palette expands even more.
The
SJ50 is much less complicated -- of course -- but, also as expected, you can dial in great hard rock and classic-modern metal tones very easily. The old Metal Lead V also approximated a 5150 (and is currently available free with the Metal collection to newletter subscribers); that's still a decent if somewhat elderly model, but the
SJ50 is both different and (though tone is always subjective) better. It's
probably more accurate, though I haven't got a real 5150 to crank up and test out!
I have a few presets that used the old Metal Lead V, and I'm going to be slowly tweaking them around to use the
SJ50. Overall, this is a bit like the old British S100 vs. the JH Gold; the S100 is OK in its way, and technically more flexible, though (IMO) the JH Gold smokes it, tone-wise, and I've used the JH Gold steadily since it came out. I expect I'll use the SJ50 more than I've used the Metal Lead V.
I know of many people who like pairing a 5150/6505-type amp with a Marshal cab with G12T-75s, exactly as presented here; I think I actually like other cabs or even just speakers with the
SJ50, but even so, the
Satch 60 cab makes another useful variant to the collection, as does the Satch Green (regardless of which speaker models it has). I do a lot of classic-rock voiced stuff, so I look forward to messing around with the
Satch Green cab shell model and messing around with speaker models. (The cab room and all its parameters is AmpliTube's secret -- but probably poorly understood and poorly utilized -- weapon! I think one of the reasons people keep asking for a built-in IR loader is that it takes a fair bit of experience messing with the cab room before you even start
thinking you
begin to understand how to use it! Not unlike learning to mic actual cabs in actual studios ....)
Speaking of which, the
Boston 100 is certainly the simplest amp model in the collection -- perhaps the simplest in AmpliTube
-- but it does
exactly "what it says on the tin": delivers you tones that Tom Scholz considered "fully produced" in 1984. So they are, of course,
hugely dated tones in that sense
but there are only a few controls, and so there's no messing around at all. You plug-in, flip a couple of switches, and you are suddenly awash in hairspray and carefully ripped jeans.
The presets that use the
Boston 100 tend to have various stomps and racks in the picture to coax out some more tonal variety, or sweetening. I'm sure producers like Mutt Lange poured additional EQ etc. on everything; the EQ racks in AmpliTube (I'd surely instead use my T-Racks etc. stuff in the DAW) may help you optimize things for your guitar.
I haven't jumped into the pedals much yet. Many of the presets combine the two Boss-type dirt pedals (
Satch Overdrive and
Satch Distortion) in interesting ways that bear further study. I've already tried dropping the
Tube Overdrive into one of my Gilmour-style presets to see how I can make it work out there.
The
Satch Octave looks interesting; I haven't used octave pedals much, though I recently had a hankering to try some things out. I didn't really get along with the one in the Slash collection (a somewhat divisive pedal, it seems), but the
Satch Octave looks like an interesting and more flexible take on what the old Octav stomp does, so I will need to mess with it some more.
The Mighty Forum Moderators should probably kill off one of the copies/threads! 
