First, the guitar. After playing maybe a total of four or five hours, the day after the game arrived, the strum button started making this horrible and annoying squeaking sound. Sometimes it seems to quiet down only to get really annoying again half a minute later. It is still usuable but I have to turn up the volume of my sound system pretty high in order to not get distracted by the squeaking. It is worst when alternate strumming which is unfortunate because I really drove myself to perfect the technique whilst playing GH3.

Next up is the drum kit. After reading about (but luckely not encountering) the problems with the RB drum kit I had pretty high expectations of the GHWT drum kit. Turns out these where misplaced. It looks and feels great (especially the sound and bounce on the pads) and works beautifully with Rock Band. However, after exactly one week, during “The Hand that Feeds” (on RB, using the GHWT kit) the green drum pad stopped working completely. At first I thought it might be just a temporary glitch so I tried with the GHWT disc but (not surprisingly) the green pad still wasn’t working. 

So now I am not happy at all (and that is putting it mildly). The guitar controller is so annyoing it is almost unplayable and the drum kit is so broken that it is unplayable. But not only that, I also loose a good deal of my spare time dealing with support and sending the stuff back. This is what annoys me the most of all because that should’ve been time playing the game.

Ah well, fortunately though the Rock Band instruments are still working perfectly (even the flimsy kick pedal is still going strong) which is admittely not something that I expected a while ago when I first started playing. Now I can only hope for the same kind of luck with the Rock Band 2 controllers – if that game ever arrives in Europe that is.