Guitar Hero: World Tour Drum Kit Malfunction

Guitar hero is one of the best selling rhythm games ever and was at the top until rival game Rock Band stepped up to the plate. With Rock Band's introduction of a microphone, drum set and four player co-op, Guitar Hero faced, for the first time, serious competition. But, Guitar Hero fought to get beck on top with its newest installment Guitar Hero: World Tour by adding its own microphone, new upgraded guitar, four player co-op, the ability to create your own songs from the ground up, and an all new drum kit that resembles an actual drum set better than its Rock Band counterpart.

But since its release in October the drum kit has gotten more hate mail than praise. A big difference that Activision Blizzard's drum kit has over Harmonix's Rock Band set is a sensitivity factor which tells the game how hard or how soft you are hitting the drum pad. This is incorporated in the game by different notes you may need to hit harder than others. But this innovative addition to game may be its biggest down fall.

Reports are coming from all over about sensitivity problems with this new drum kit, mainly with the red drum pad and the yellow cymbal which are located on the drum kits left side. Common reports are of both pads failing to register hits, only activate when struck in certain spots, or even being sensitive that striking one pad can even activate another one. And it appears that the problems occur on every system. I personally own the drum kit for the xbox 360 and have experienced slight issues when first playing mainly with trying to get the red pad to register my hard hits for extra points and with the foot pedal registering. But it all seems to work fine now.

A few tech-savvy people decided to tear open their drum kits to figure out the problem and on doing so noticed that manufacturers did not secure certain wires properly resulting in the sensitivity problems.

Activision is currently taking note of the recent onslaught of negative feedback from consumers and is working on several things to fix the problem. They offer a 90-day warranty to customers allowing them to return their drum kits free of charge but may not cover shipping rates and stated that they also will be offering a drum tuning kit that will allow users to fully enjoy the potential of their drum kit.
Article Written by: Zack Duncan

TGN Cincinnati Tournament After Thoughts

Well last Saturday I decided to still go to TGN Cincinnati. If you have looked at my previous post you can clearly see that I did not have high hopes before going to the tournament. Well I decided to still go. The only problem though was literally the entire week before our team kept hearing more and more bad news. The people we were going to have to could not go so we instead had to settle with local kids we knew at our school. So we were pretty much going to this tournament with a team we had never played with or practiced with before.

When we got there is was pleasantly surprised to see a conference room at the holiday in jam packed with kids playing Halo 3. I would assume there were well over 200 people there for the entire time I was at the tournament. We got there around 11 and for about the next 6 hours we watched Halo 3. The tournament was really well set-up and the worked there were really friendly. The teams there for Halo 3 were really good. There was even a handful of pro’s there including Strongside, Snipedown, and Ace. I am pretty sure there was more, but I do not follow MLG closely enough to know all of them by site. Strongside and Ace were both in the doubles tournament and they were a blast to watch play. I have never seen so many headshots before, you could definitely tell they were pro.

As far as the Gears Of War 2 tournament went it was pretty much a joke and I am pretty sure I am done playing Gears Of War 2 because it just is not that much fun to play compared to Halo 3. For GOW2, only 3 teams showed up. We had only about 30 minutes of practice and our team just got destroyed round after round by this other team who was clearly better than our hastily put together team. It might have been a different story if we had our original team there. The set-up though was awful for me atleast. We had 2 tv’s per team and were required to play split screen on these tiny 22 inch screen’s. (This was awful for me because I am used to playing on my 22 inch monitor that looks absolutely amazing and whenever I play on something else I complain like no other and that is without splitscreen!) Well we ended up getting 2nd out of 3 teams. So it was not a complete failure. We lost our $200 and our pride and we did not get anything for second because their was only 3 teams.

Another game they had going on later was Call Of Duty WAW. This was by far the saddest site I have ever seen. These kids complained so much and they all hid like 10 year old noobs the entire time. Anyone who has ever played COD knows how many annoying people play the game and these kids were twice as worse as the most annoying kid I have met on Call Of Duty.

All in all I had a good time going to the tournament because I got to watch a Halo 3 tournament and got to see some pros. It was fun, but next time I think I am just going to watch Halo 3 and not waste $200 on a tournament I knew I was not going to win.

Gears Of War 2 Tournament This Weekend

Tomorrow on Saturday December 13th I will be going to a Gears Of War 2 tournament in Cincinnati. At first I was very optomistic about the tournament. My friend signed us up. He said it was a $10,000 tournament and that was all i knew about it.

Well i decided to do my own research. the website for the tournament is halo3pro.com/. Turns out the tournament is more than just gears, it also has Guitar Hero 3, Cod, and Halo 3. Also after reading the fine print this is what i found out about the prize pool.
"TGN's Cincinnati, has an estimated Prize Pool of $3,000-$8,000. Winners will receive between 60%-90% of the total payout as soon as the competition ends, any remaining funds will be paid in 20%-50% installments every 6-8 weeks as long as the team competes in the TGN Online Pro Arena against other TGN Pro Teams."

Also the website is a joke and is hardly ever updated. Their forums are a ghost town and you cannot even sign up for the forums because their sign up utility is broke! It gets even worse, they do not even have the Gears of War 2 tournament rules yet and their Halo tournament is not even mlg settings and the freaking website is called HALO3PRO!

Well since I wanted to make some strats with my team I decided to call them yesterday. Ofcourse they did not answer the phone. So I did the next best thing and I emailed them. I told them I would like to know the rules and how many teams have signed up because I am not driving all the way down their and spending $200 for our team to come to some joke tournament. Guess what, no response!

Well tommorow is the tournament and tonight we are practicing. I cannnot wait to follow up this post and tell you how it went. If you wish to play with us tonight in a private match add my GT: BATTLEGAURD123.

Also if anyone has any information about this very sad excuse of a tournament please comment this post or message me.

Modded Xbox 360 Laptop

BenHeck has done it again. He has made something that even Microsoft cannot do. This is a really nice modded 360. It looks like the entire thing is made out of aluminum and also looks like it might weigh twice as much as a normal 360. The screen is a very nice touch and everything looks almost professionally done or certainly a lot better than most other attempts. The features on this mod is what is truly impressive.

Not only did he fit a laptop into that cramped space, fit a screen on it, and make it all out of aluminum, but I think he has not lost a single feature with this build. If you watch the video which you should you can see that he has been able to fit in the hard drive, wireless adapter, 2 memory card slot, and 1 USB slot into the laptop design.

This machine is truly impressive and the only question left to ask is when can I get one!