GHWT Drum Tuning Kit

November 3, 2008

Does your brand new Guitar Hero World Tour drum set not respond properly?  Well do we have a solution for you.  All you have to do is download a drum tuning kit to your computer and connect your drums by using a midi-USB cable.  It seems they don’t want the product returned to them, they want you to fix it.  I personally like the idea of being able to tune your drums for whatever reason except for having to a fix a product right out of the box, that’s sort of ridiculous.

The fix sounds simple enough but the drum tuning kit software only works on Windows XP and Windows Vista.  Folks with an earlier operating system are out of luck, oh yeah, and you Apple users can’t use this software either.  Even if you do have one of the machines that are able to run this software you will need a midi-USB cable, which I am sure not everyone has just sitting around somewhere.  If you fill out the form online at the link below they will send you one for free but more of your precious time has to be wasted when all you really wanted was to beat on your drums.

Similar issues occurred with the original Rock Band release and their guitars breaking down.  I was a victim of this twice myself.  It took almost two and a half weeks for me to even use one of their guitars.  I was compensated with a free game at the time which seemed fair enough.  Is anyone else sick of peripherals not working right out of the box when you are paying these crazy amounts for them?

To download the tuning kit installer and receive your free midi-USB cable, click here.

By Tyler Tschida | Tagged , , | Comments (4)

EA Confirms Workaround for Spore Mac Patch

October 13, 2008

I just heard back from EA with a functional workaround for installing the v1.1 patch for Spore on the Mac. I’m sure by now you’ve heard about all the wonderful issues with the patch. But after spending a few hours, I now have everything up and running with the newest patched version on my MacBook Pro.

Here’s the gist. You need to uninstall the game from your system. Don’t worry, your save data won’t get removed. Drag the SPORE folder from Applications to the trash. Then fire up Finder and go to “/Users/[Username]/Library/Preferences/[Game Name] Preferences/p_drive” and delete all the files there as well. Once that’s done, reinstall the game and download the patch when prompted. Now, here’s where things get interesting. This is a line from the email I received from EA:

*Please Note: This process may take a considerable amount of time. The patch process may seem to stall, but the installation of the latest update could take up to 20 minutes. Please be patient.

I did that and, after 20 minutes, the patch completed the install and Spore booted up. The game ran fine and things worked as you would expect.

So there you have it. If you try to patch your game on your Mac and it freezes up, follow these directions and you’ll be off and running. Get some.

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , , , | Comment (1)

Spore Patch for Mac Breaks Everything

October 10, 2008

I’m not an angry person, but this is part one of what set me off last night. I bought myself a copy of Spore a little while ago and finally got down to start playing it Thursday night. I installed and fired up the game and was prompted to download a patch. Ok, seems normal. What PC/Mac game doesn’t have patches? What ensued started a fire-storm.

I sat there for literally an hour and a half as this patch downloaded and tried to install. Guess what? It froze up my entire MacBook Pro. Yep, good times. So, I restarted and fired up the game again. Not being prompted for the patch this time, it took (again, no exaggeration) ten minutes for me to get to a point where I could create a new game (I already have a Spore account, so all I had to do was login). After starting a new game, I entered the Cell stage. To my surprise, I had NO creature displayed on my screen. That’s right, I didn’t exist. Yay! Yet another broken piece of the puzzle.

Hit the jump for more »

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (13)

No Review: wipEout HD (PS3)

October 4, 2008

According to our internal schedule, a review for wipEout HD for the PlayStation Network was supposed to drop this week for you. However, the game’s problems have prevented that from happening. There have been numerous reports across the intarwebs are freezing, and I am one of those who was susceptible.

We’re been in touch with Sony and are following the progress of a patch very closely. As soon as I can actually play the game, you’ll get a review. As for now, be careful when purchasing as you might not be able to play it. Some reports suggest having a friends list greater than 50 people is the culprit, but who knows. Mine is definitely larger than that.

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , | Comment (1)

Spore Servers Overloaded, Crash

September 5, 2008

It seems that EA’s DRM policy is hurting a lot of gamers right now. Spore dropped today in a lot of places and the EA authentication servers have crashed under the load. Users can’t activate their game, which means all online aspects are null and void.

While this doesn’t mean you can’t play the game, you can’t have other people’s Spore creatures come and populate your world and other aspects of the game. This somewhat takes away from the experience.

EA says the servers should be back up in about 5 hours. But still, shouldn’t they have anticipated this? They expected the game to sell over 2 million copies in the first month. You have to expect that day 1 will be huge.

Anybody out there having trouble activating their copies of Spore?

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , | Comments (3)

Rush Album on Rock Band Broken, Pulled

August 27, 2008

I was all types of excited for “Moving Pictures” by Rush hitting Rock Band. I was sick all day yesterday, so it wasn’t even a thought in my mind. But today, I find out I have to wait. Apparently the album’s release has been marred with technical issues.

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen technical difficulties, we won’t be able to release Rush’s “Moving Pictures” this week. We’ll be working on it as hard as we can, but it looks like it could be a couple of weeks to fix. In the meantime we will be moving around our schedule so we still have DLC coming out each week (including this week, info to follow in another announcement).

Boo on that. Guess it’ll be a while. But it looks like we might be getting something this week. No word yet, but we’ll keep you posted. My guess is that it will go up tomorrow, since it’s the only time the PlayStation Store gets updated.

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Konami Won’t Sell MGO Expansion in 30 Countries

July 28, 2008

Metal Gear Online Screen

Oh, Konami. The problems just keep piling up. Yet another one that could have been easily solved by using the PSN and PlayStation Store. The Gene Expansion pack cannot be sold in 30 countries (the PS3 is sold in these countries and they can purchase from the PlayStation Store).

According to Konami’s website, the following countries cannot puchase anything from their online store:

Andorra, Bahrain, Bosnia Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Egypt, Estonia, Gibraltar, Hungary, Iceland, India, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Latvia, Lebanon, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Malta & Gozo, Monaco, Montenegro, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Russia, San Marino, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Turkey, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, Vatican

That’s a lot of places, some pretty large, that Konami is ostrocizing. The entire country of Russia? Come on now. I really hope Sony takes the initiative to force developers to use the PSN for online portions of titles. We need to avoid this type of thing in the future. The fact that all this is happening with a Game of the Year candidate makes it that much worse.

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , | Comments (9)

No Fix in Sight for Broken Metal Gear Online Expansion

July 21, 2008

Metal Gear Online Screen

It only gets worse for Konami… The botched launch of the Gene Expansion for Metal Gear Online will continue to suffer as they can’t figure out what the problem is. Yeah, good times.

This is yet another perfect reason to have a unified service. Had this expansion (and all online aspects of Metal Gear) been handled by the PSN and the PlayStation Store, this issue should not have occured.

Sadly, I think Konami just lost a lot of MGO players permanently. Why dedicate yourself to a game that’s going to break every month?

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , | Comments (0)

Metal Gear Online Expansion Release Botched

July 19, 2008

mgo.jpg

Oh, Konami. You just can’t seem to get the online right with Metal Gear, can you? First we had all the issues with the Konami ID, then only getting one character, and now the Gene Expansion just released is causing major troubles.

The MGO Shop and new Reward Shop are both up and down (mostly down) with some players reporting having purchased the Gene Expansion but not receiving anything. Seriously, why can’t this all be tied into the PSN? Have everything on the PlayStation Store, not in some web page shop you have to access with the PS3 Browser.

To top it all off, Konami is blocking random strings of IP addresses from accessing the shops and even the game. Most people I’ve spoken with have had major trouble playing MGO over the past few days. If things like this keep happening, I’d expect people to stop playing Metal Gear Online completely. Why go through all the hassle when there are online games just as good that work easier?

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Xbox 360 Number 10 Has Arrived

July 13, 2008

Loot Ninja Faceplate on my Xbox 360

Number one through nine obviously didn’t pan out. All died from either disc read errors or the Red Ring of Death. Number 9, a Falcon, suffered the dreaded RRoD a little over a week ago. Finally, I have a replacement Elite. It’s obviously a Falcon, so I can only hope this one works out better than the last Falcon that crapped the bed on me.

Everyone keep their fingers crossed that Xbox 360 stops hating me. I really don’t want to have to replace it again.

By Matt Banks | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)