Well with the excitement of RockBand upon us all, many of those good boys and girls that waited so eagerly to open their bundles of RockBand made a rather rude discovery. Their peripherals were broken, this could range from a nonfunctional guitar, broken whammy bar, a strum bar that had a mind of it’s own or a wonky microphone that doesn’t register correctly. All in all it is a pretty upsetting discovery once you get everything unpacked and decide to sit down and get some gaming in, especially for a game that costs $170.

Well the good news is that EA/Harmonix is aware of the problems and actually has a website dedicated to rectifying the issues. Pretty much you log in and set up an EA account and then let them know, which peripheral is FUBAR. After that it will ask for your shipping info and give you an option of them sending a new peripheral out via two day air delivery and charging you $125 fee, to make sure that you send your broken one back, or you can go the none charging route and just request a prepaid box and wait for that to arrive. Being impatient and pretty cheesed about my wireless guitar playing like an old shoe, I chose the 2 day option.

As you describe your problem in the forms there is actually one step where they give you a trouble shooting suggestion, for my non-functioning strum bar they told me to blow compressed air into the guitar? Apparently the guitar was packed in the desert and sand is intruding upon its performance as an instrument?! It kind of reminded me of the days when you had to blow into a Nintendo cartridge in order to get it to work properly Here I am in my living room blowing into the guitar in hopes of getting in a round of RockBand, sad times!

You actually get an RMA (Returned Merchandise Authorization) number as well as a tracking number to see where your package is in the world. You also get a follow up email form EA thanking you for your patience and providing you an incident number for tracking purposes. I will keep you all updated as to how the whole process turns out, but so far so good except for the fact that I was shipped a broken controller to start with. Really makes you wonder what is going on with quality control, this is a wide spread problem with the RockBand peripherals and I am very surprised they rushed them out with all these issues. I also may have a microphone that is on the fritz but I will need to look into that a bit more.