A Broken Rock Band Christmas December 5, 2011

In 2007, Guitar Hero II had surpassed all expectations and was on its way to creating a whole new genre of gaming. By the end of 2007, everyone was looking forward to the release of not just Guitar Hero III but the game more people considered Guitar Hero II‘s sequel, Rock Band.

Rock Band released with not just a guitar controller, but drum and microphone support. Nowadays every new music game supports that, but it wasn’t until Rock Band that the game and hardware to support it would see a release.

I picked up a full boxed Special Edition of the game in stores the day after Christmas. A Special Edition of the game came with everything, all controllers and instruments. I had already played it with some friends when it was released so I knew it was a great game before I bought it. As I unpacked the game, I saw a notice on top of the box to call the publisher if I have any problem with the controllers instead of returning the game to the store.

I played that game a lot, starting with the guitar campaign. By the very next day the guitar controller broke on me for no reason at all.

Apparently the publisher discovered before the game shipped that the strum bars on some of the guitar controllers were broken very easily just with regular use. To ship out the amount of copies to fill shelves, they shipped the game anyway and figured if anyone had a problem with the guitars, they would just ship them replacements free of charge.

I went through the website provided in the included letter with the game box and told the site I had a guitar with a malfunctioning strum bar. They told me I had two options. They could send me a box free of charge to send the guitar back to them in, and once they got it they would send me a new guitar or they could send me a guitar immediately but it would mean a charge of $130 to my credit card that would only be removed once they received the broken guitar. Well, I couldn’t afford that second option so I choose the first.

I was planning a vacation after the New Year, so instead of having the guitar by the time I got back, because I didn’t get the box before I left I couldn’t send the guitar out until I came back.

The worst part about this was there were no copies of Guitar Hero III on shelves any time after Christmas. The game was sold out in pretty much every store until deep into January, so it was a long wait. I did eventually get a working controller, but by that point I was playing Guitar Hero III.

I had also heard of other people having worse problems, like being sent guitars or guitar boxes for the wrong platform, putting their credit at extreme risk. There was no technical support number provided so if you had any problems with the process you would have to start digging for phone numbers and hope you got through to the right person.

As bad as it was, it could have been worse. It could have been the experience I had with Rock Band 2.

Father From an Analog Generation December 1, 2011

For those of you who have been enjoying my little series on Christmas, I have a small revelation to make. Not all my gaming related Christmas stories are shopping related! Christmas is also about friends and family and this story is about that!

Last year, I was hanging out at diskreader117’s place right after Christmas. He wanted to show me his brand new HDTV, which he was now using to play his Xbox 360. He had been playing Halo Wars on it (he’s a fan of strategy games like Age of Empires) and I asked him to show me what the cutscenes looked like on it, since that would be the best benchmark for the TV’s quality. When the image popped up, it looked…wrong. Completely wrong. The screen was fuzzy, the black bars were far too wide and there was a lot of static over the image.

Another major peeve of mine is seeing an improperly formatted image on a TV. I know for the longest time people have complained about seeing black bars in DVDs, but theatrical black bars can be lessened or even completely eliminated when exhibted on widescreen televisions (which are pretty standard nowadays for new TVs). Just like the eye can detect fakeness quite easily, I can detect an improper image just as fast, and will usually say, “That image is wrong,” and endeavor to correct the issue before the person can ask “What’s wrong?” Most modern HDMI supported players can take care of these problems automatically, but some older players (or players that aren’t hooked up with an HDMI cable) need the user to set what the proper resolution and dimentions of the tv is on initial setup. Since some people don’t know about this requirement (or any of their own TV’s specifications) they just leave the settings untouched and lose the benefits of the extra money they spent on their equipment. If you’ve ever had to look at a 480i image on a 1080p screen you know you’ll never want to see it again if you can avoid it.

I asked him who hooked up his 360 to the new TV and he said his father had done it. Sure enough, when I looked at the back of his HDTV only the standard definition portion of the 360’s video cable was used. The HD component cables were left dangling from the back of the TV.

It wasn’t really his father’s fault. Never having owned an HDTV before, he used the connections he had just always been familiar with, and that was limited to just one (yellow) pin plug video cable. He was unfamiliar with three pin component cables (red, blue and green) which had become standard with DVD for progressive and HD video playback. Never seeing the 360 in HD before, diskreader had just assumed what he was seeing was normal.

I plugged his component cables in and started testing what resolutions his HDTV could support. We bumped up the 360’s resolution to 1080p and loaded up the game. The difference was like night and day and diskreader could now enjoy his new tv to its fullest.

The moral to this Christmas story (and the previous one) is that with all this new technology coming out for home theater systems every year, if you intend to buy new home theater equipment and you don’t know anything about how it works, consult someone who does. Don’t hire the people who work at the store, I’ve seen they’re actually not very knowledgeable about what they’re selling. You likely have at least one person in your family or friend circles who does. If you don’t, I recommend finding someone local who is experienced with home theaters and pay them to take care of setting your equipment up for you or instruct you how to do it yourself. It will save you a lot of headaches and will give you quite a Merry Christmas indeed!