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Guitar Hero World Tour Equipment Problems, Subscription Possibilities?
Guitar Hero: World Tour's recent launch saw boxes of plastic instruments flying off store shelves, quickly selling out in many areas. Unfortunately, many players reported problems with the bundled drums sets, prompting Activision to release a drum "tuning" application and a free midi-USB cable to connect the instruments to a PC. Otherwise, reviews for the game have been largely positive, and MTV's Multiplayer Blog did an analysis of using Rock Band drums in GH:WT, and vice-versa. Kotaku looked at which set was louder, coming to the conclusion that while they sound different, decibel levels are very similar. The early success in sales for GH:WT caused Activision to say holiday demand may not be met, and that they're examining two methods in particular to develop the franchise: instrument upgrades (hopefully less ludicrous than Logitech's $250 axe) and the possibility of a subscription-based model for user-generated content. "[Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby] Kotick says that there are now 25,000 user generated tunes that have been created for the game, and projected 'up to 100,000 songs' by the end of this year."
a subscription for user-generated content? so Activision wants users to pay them money to share their self-created content?
why are mainstream game publishers run by such douche bags? it's not enough that users are adding value to their product by donating their time/creativity to create new content for the game, but now the game publisher wants to "monetize" this content by charging users for sharing their own songs with each other.
Shouldn't the user generated content be free?
I mean, it's not costing them to produce, and their own stuff means servers and bandwidth are already necessary, right?
I'm betting user-generated content will be finding its way onto bittorrent along with a crack for any kind of lock-in to the subscription service.
I bought the full band kit, and just got off the phone with walmart about returning it. Here's what I've had:
The drums are a bit better to use in theory, but the sensitivity (out of the box) is too low. I really have to hit things above where I'm comfortable and it isn't forgiving if you had poor aim. I got a blood blister after some extended playing.
Using star power is random. Sometimes it gives it to you, often times it doesnt.
I ordered the USB-MIDI adapter to fix my drum kit. It came in 4 business days. My computer detects it but doesn't do anything with it. Its not an option on the drum controller drop-down and none of the MIDI options are substitutes. Restarting didn't help nor did disabling the other audio devices. It shows up under the device manager though and has a green light when connected. So... I can't fix it.
My guitar's strum broke today and has about a 5% chance of registering a downward strum now. The tap bar was always iffy with it, and the star power button used for muting was flat out inconsistent.
I broke part of the things used for holding the drum sticks by playing with them up. Don't do that.
Freak on a Leash is fun to play, a lot of the songs aren't though. They're long and repetitive. Whoever put Dinosaur Jr. in there should be shot.
Red Octane makes you pay to ship your defective device to them, with a copy of the receipt (mind you this game hasn't been out for 90 days). Its hard to find their warranty returns on their website. Here's a link:
http://www.redoctanegames.com/Warranty/USA/
That is why I'm returning the kit to wal-mart, I dont feel like I should pay 12 dollars and take extra time out of my work day to drop off a package, then wait 3 weeks to get another potentially defective device.