Make The Switch

I’ve been playing the Guitar Hero games since before the Rock Band franchise started. It was one of the two killer applications that caused me to buy a seventh-gen console. I’ve gotten every incarnation of it since GH3. I love its guitar mapping interface and its awesome track list that has exposed me to a lot of great bands I hadn’t heard before.

But all has not been well in my land of fake instrumentation. I got a set of GH:WT drums for Christmas and they were awesome. The drums are the one actual rock band instrument I’ve never played and I always wanted to learn how, even if it was on a peripheral. I love that in a good 90 minutes of gameplay, I can burn 1,000 calories. But the cymbal pad stopped working three weeks into January. I got a replacement. One week later, the cymbal’s WIRE went bad. I let them sit for a month, then got a replacement last night. It worked for 20 minutes before the cymbal went bad AGAIN! 10 minutes later, my Amazon confirmation for Wii Rock Band 2: Special Edition and The Beatles Rock Band was in my inbox and my GH:WT drums are waiting to be carried out to the curb when bulk trash day comes around.

Seriously, I know it was a gift, but COME ON! The Guitar Hero franchise was right to get on the full-band peripheral bandwagon after the blazing success of the original Rock Band. But I come to find out that this is a very common complaint among gamers across all platforms (Wii/PS3/XBox). Red Octane and Activision just weren’t willing to shell out the money necessary to produce a quality set of drums. And it’s a shame too, because they were great pioneers in taking the niche carved out by Dance Dance Revolution and making it the greatest social gaming phenomenon of the past five years. They really should have been on the cutting edge of this market.