I'm Calling The World Tour Off

To celebrate my recent birthday and the upcoming birthday of some religious guy born a few thousand years ago I did the right thing in this world of consumerism and bought myself Guitar Hero: World Tour for the Xbox 360.

To help the transition to the new Guitar Hero I sold our Wii copy of Guitar Hero III with its two guitars. Why not just upgrade? Well, mainly because the Wii's audio output is utter crap, not to mention the lack of downloadable content for Guitar Hero on Wii and the laughable video capabilities of the rebadged GameCube.

So with fresh eBay cash in hand I spent most of my Sunday (Nov 30) searching for an Xbox 360 version of the game. I eventually found one at JB Hi Fi in Preston and proceded to grab the complete band super duper box set of World Tour which includes the new guitar, microphone and the ground-breaking fake drumkit (see above/left).

After rocking out to a few tracks, starting a band with my wife and daughter and making it out of rehab I found that the red pad on the drumkit (that would be the "snare") had started ignoring my hits. I tried to go through the drum training initially but couldn't complete the velocity sensing bit where you can hit the drums harder to get louder notes, it just wasn't working. Then, around Wednesday the snare packed it in altogether and nothing could be done.

So being the good user I am I read the manual and found I was to contact Activision directly for any support issues with the hardware. I perused their online support and discovered I had to order their free USB-to-MIDI cable to adjust the sensitivity of the drumkit.

Said cable arrived yesterday (8th of Dec.) and after miraculously getting the drumkit, which was attached to my PC, to talk to my Xbox 360 down the other end of the house I found that even after setting the snare's sensitivity to 20 (the highest value) I still did not respond. The other drum pads when set to this level would trigger if a sparrow farted in the next room.

So it was back to the Activision website for more help. They said that if the issue wasn't with the sensitivity of the pad then I needed to send the offending part back to Activision in Sydney. Of course the problem I have is with the snare on the largest part of the kit so it got bundled back into the enormous box it came in and came to the Post Office with me this morning.

Activision, while offering a Reply Paid address for sending warranty requests back, were sneaky enough in that to use Registered Mail the sender (that's me!) is required to pay the full amount upfront. I refused Registered Mail initially until the post office clerk said I should probably wrap the box differently incase it went walkabout. I ended up paying $16 to ship the drumkit back to Activision via Registered Mail.

So now I have to wait "up to 2 weeks" for the kit to be looked at and assessed by the techs at the other end. *fingers crossed* I get the drumkit back in working order in time for my Christmas break but until then I'll have to be happy with the guitar and microphone.