The Ethics of Guitar Controllers

So I'm pretty sure all of you have heard about Rock Band and/or Guitar Hero at this point, so I'm not going to add an unnecessary introduction and will instead jump right into the savoury mechanically-separated chicken meat of the issue at hand. If you haven't heard of those two games, by all means go ahead and Wiki them. You can Google them if you want to, but don't blame me if you end up at a page with Peruvian midgets making out with polar bears.

A couple of weekends ago, after finishing the Saturday shift at the store, I played some Rock Band in order to unwind. Since this was early in the morning and folks were trying to sleep I had to limit my choice of instruments to the guitar. However, I am seriously not a fan of the Rock Band guitar. It might not be a dinky Fisher-Price guitar like the one that comes with Guitar Hero, but I despise the strum bar. You see, the strum bar for the GH guitar will give a nice little click for each strum, which is incredibly handy for keeping rhythm. Not only does the RB guitar lack the click, the strum bar also has a lot less "give" than on the GH guitar. Another frustration is that the "Star Power/Overdrive" constantly activates itself if I try to play sitting down.

All of this typically results in me doing a lot more poorly on songs using the RB guitar than I would with the GH guitar. And since I originally started playing RB with the GH guitar (I got tired of waiting for the set and bought the software without all the accompanying instruments) I have a direct comparison for performance and that leads to severe frustration. When you can beat a song with no problems on Expert, then have a devil of a time even passing Hard on the same song using the different guitar? Tears of rage, my friends.

And let me tell you, I was pretty close to crying those tears that night two weeks ago. After almost bombing out on Dead on Arrival by Fall Out Boy, I was beside myself and was sure I had a busted controller. Because obviously, I can never suck at anything. In a fit of grey rage I jumped onto the Electronic Arts website and demanded that they send me a replacement guitar. Well, I filled out some forms in a demanding manner. Knuckles as white as those have never been seen before, and probably never will again.

There are two options for this. One is that they send you a shipping box, you send your broken guitar, then once they receive it they send a replacement. However, if you have a credit card, you can have them send a new one right away, and if you somehow forget to send the broken one to them, they'll ding your card for some obscene amount... somewhere around 150 dollars, if I remember correctly. I don't have a card, so I chose option 1.

Second is the mailing address. Since they use UPS/Purolator, the box can't be sent to a general delivery address. Since I'm using one of those as my main address now, I decided to fill in the address of the store I work at.

Anyways, after I had a good night sleep I hesitantly tried playing Rock Band again and found that sometimes all you need is a little rest to play at your best. Immediately feeling remorse at what I had done, I tried to cancel the impending guitar return I all-too-eagerly orchestrated a scant six hours previous. No quick and easy options presented themselves, so I resolved to just toss out the box when it eventually arrived.

Cut to last Wednesday when amongst the hub-bub of the arrival of the new slush machines a package is shoved in front of my face. Hooray? It's arrived. I pick it up to put it to the side when I notice it has a hell of a lot more weight than it should have. I open the box to find a replacement guitar inside.

Now this is one heck of a situation. You see, Electronic Arts has neither my real address nor my credit card number. If I so desired, I could probably keep it and nobody could really do much of anything. I'm kind of surprised they did this! I mean, that's some serious temptation right there. At least, it would be if I liked the RB guitar and I had someone to actually use the second guitar with me. Oh well. At the end of the day I have enough bad karma, so I'm just going to stick the new one unopened back in the box with a little note saying the other guitar isn't having problems anymore.

I'm still surprised at the amount of people who are telling me to keep the guitar, though, and that Electronic Arts deserves it for screwing up. That's a big ol' boo for being honest, I guess. And so the world turns ever onward.