We recently got our hands on the Full Band edition of Guitar Hero: World Tour.  In case you’re keeping track at home, that brings our plastic instrument total up to 6 guitars and 3 drum kits.  Blurgh.  It seems like half of the basement is now dedicated to storing rhythm-based music game peripherals.  With the recent patching of Guitar Hero III and Rock Band to allow compatibility between the guitars for each game on the PS3, I really don’t see the need to have this much junk around anymore.  I ramble too much, as this article isn’t about the quantity of the instruments but instead about the quality.

When Guitar Hero World Tour was announced and included drums as part of the game, I knew right away that there would be problems.  It turns out, I was right…but still kinda dumb since I bought them anyway.  Why would I buy yet another set of plastic drums?  They have plastic cymbals!  Oh, Chris, you wasteful fool.

As it turns out, those cymbals don’t work so good.  As I played the game for the first time, I grew increasingly more frustrated as I knew I was playing the rhythms correctly, yet the hits weren’t registering.  I couldn’t tell which of the drums was the guilty party, so I went on the RedOctane support page to see if anyone else had registered a similar problem.  Apparently, they had.  RedOctane has made available a MIDI-to-USB adapter that, along with some software that can be downloaded from their website, allows you to tune the sensitivity of the drum kit.  To their credit, I registered the problem with them on Sunday and the adapter was at our world headquarters on Thursday.  Impressive.

The process of tuning essentially requires a laptop, since you must have the drums plugged into a computer at the same time as you play in the Recording Studio option in the game.  This wasn’t really a problem for us but for some people the process of moving a PC right next to a TV or vice-versa might be a real pain in the ass.

What I don’t understand is why this has to be done at all.  It seems like this should be pretty easy to preset at the factory and have a few quality assurance drones to ensure that everything continues to work properly through the production run.  Having the end user set it at home seems like a terrible idea although I guess it is a better solution than having to ship back the entire drum kit.  RedOctane is saying that the problem is only in the first few runs of the drum peripheral but did no one test them before they shipped?

While on the subject of mishits and frustration, I’d like to touch upon a problem that plagues all music games: lag.  The developers of this genre of games need to come up with a better way of calibrating the audio/video lag in their systems.  Last night, Julie and I played Guitar Hero: World Tour for about an hour and spent about half time going to the menu and trying to get the calibration correct.  By the end, Julie became so frustrated with it that she didn’t even want to play the game anymore, although playing Do It Again by Steely Dan on guitar had a lot to do with it as well.  There must be a way to engineer the USB microphones to detect the audio delay and perhaps a webcam can be used to detect the video lag.  It shouldn’t come down to the player having to click along with a video and ending up with widly varying results.

The sales numbers for Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero: World Tour are both down compared to their respective predecessors.  Perhaps its the harsh economic times we’re in or perhaps people are finally sick of having to deal with a bunch of shoddy, imprecise plastic peripherals.

Oh, you mean the whole point of the game ISN’T trying to get the calibration correct?  You could have fooled me.

As someone who works in an electronics production environment, I can pretty much guarantee that they knew about the drum kit problem before shipping, and decided that an earlier release with XX% of deffectives was preferable to a late release with no problems.