Rock Band’s Hydra Head

My original Rock Band guitar suffered from the bad “down strum” problem that many people were experiencing.  Luckily, EA’s support was actually surprisingly good for it.  I just filled out a quick Web Form and within about a week I received my new Rock Band guitar.  I packed up my old guitar and sent it off back to them and the process was completed quickly.

I thought I would give my new guitar a shot to ensure that they had fixed the problem.  Sure enough, the strum bar seems to work fine now.  But in place of a bad strum bar, I have two different problems that have now sprung up. Although neither of the problems are as detrimental to the gameplay as a bad strum bar, both are kind of annoying.

The first problem is that the fret buttons seem much “clickier” than my original guitar.  One of the things I really liked about the Rock Band guitar was the fact that the strum bar didn’t click like the Guitar Hero one did.  It made it feel a bit more natural, and reduced the “real” sound of playing the virtual guitar.  But now with my new Rock Band guitar, the fret buttons click and clack like never before, sort of rendering the advantage of the silent strum bar worthless.   I don’t need total silence, but the buttons click so much now (and seem slightly more difficult to depress at the same time) that during particularly tough sequences, it just sounds sort of messy.

The second problem is that the “Overdrive” (Star Power to those with Guitar Hero) seems much more difficult to activate on the new guitar.  I’ve raised the guitar way over my head, jerked it back and forth, and sometimes it just does nothing.  Actually, there are other times when I’ll seemingly be in the exact same position as I always am, and I can’t NOT activate “overdrive”.  As soon as my power gets to the halfway point it can activate.  So, in other words, it’s often difficult to activate my overdrive when I actually want to.  I think I can partially remedy this by sitting up very straight when playing, but other than a couple accidental activations, this wasn’t really an issue before whatever my posture may have been.

I imagine it’s probably not worth it to call EA again unless my Overdrive stops working completely, but they probably haven’t made any changes to the guitars again by now anyway.  I’m going to keep playing with it for awhile and see if it gets any better, but it’s just too bad that they couldn’t get it just right for this game.  I really do prefer the strum on it to the Guitar Hero guitars, but if I’m clicking away on the frets anyway, it probably doesn’t make much of a difference.