It took me a good long while, but I finally managed to get a working copy of Guitar Hero 2 this week and have been slowly but surely making my way through the game. I was a huge fan of the first GH (note my rave review and all my other posts about the game) but I didn’t immediately buy GH2 when it came out. They’d announced an Xbox 360 version was in the works so I decided to hold off.
I’m not new to the Harmonix fan-dom. I have lots of their earlier games, including the Karaoke Revolution series. And what happened with those is that I bought the first few versions for the PS2, but then they had all the previous songs downloadable on the Xbox so not only did I go out and buy the new version on the Xbox, I re-purchased all the old songs again so I could sing any song without having to swap disks. Lesson learned, I was buying GH2 on Xbox 360 since I knew there would be downloads of songs.
The wait seemed long, but I got a bit of time in at work when people brought in their PS2 copies of the game and we played over lunch or after hours. But when the release date was set, I hopped on over to Red Octane to look for more info and was pleased to see they had a store! So I pre-ordered there because they offered free shipping and a nifty bag to carry my controller. Big mistake. Big.
My game showed up about 2 days after the launch date, which wasn’t too bad. But my buddies had all run over to the local Best Buy and just picked up copies on launch day. Oh well, what’s a few days, right? Wrong. I rush home after work and load up my game. First up, you have to enter a name for your band. I seemed to be having a ridiculous amount of difficulty accomplishing this. I’d hit the strum bar to select a letter and it would overshoot my target or keep going even when I wasn’t pushing anything. Weird, I thought. But I soldiered on and got my band name in there. But then I tried to play the first song and I realized the controller was completely broken.
Strumming downwards didn’t work. And if I shook the controller, it thought I was strumming. Something was broken in there, and this wasn’t good. I was sooo sad. I immediately went over to the Red Octane website to find out how to get a refund and return this stinker. But there was no email address and no phone number to call anywhere! They had a web form, so I filled it out saying I wanted to return the thing. My thinking was, they mailed this out once and it was broken, I don’t want an exchange where they’ll just send might just send me another broken unit. It could go on for months like that.
A week goes by and I hear crickets. Finally, I get an email with a refund id and instructions to ship it back at my own cost and the information that I’ll be charged a 15% restocking fee. At this point I go a little crazy. They expect me to pay them for the privilege of returning their defective product??? That’s not right. In lieu of being able to chew someone out over the phone, I have to settle for another angry message into their form system. I go off on how this is not proper customer support, and the fact that they’re having known quality issues with their product means they shouldn’t charge their customers for having to deal with their problems. And blah blah blah, rant rant. I don’t hear anything at all back.
So I give up on Red Octane. They may manufacture the controllers, but they don’t know how to run a store. Do NOT, I repeat, do NOT purchase anything directly from their store. Customer service doesn’t appear to be something they’ve invested in.
I decided to take advantage of the large corporation known as Best Buy. Operation Hoodwink underway. I purchased a new copy of GH at my local BB. Hallelujah, it works! I’ve been playing all week and I’m so glad. Now to get rid of that old controller… I’ll leave the rest of my plan up to your imagination.
2 Responses to “Getting My Guitar Hero On”
I bought my copy of GH2 for the 360 at a Game Stop. Unfortunately after only a week, the strum bar, last three frets, and the 360 button stopped working. I returned the whole thing and put the credit on a gift card, expecting to be able to get a new one right away (there were none left when I made my return). With 2 Game Stops and one ebGames right near me I figured it would be easy to find a new copy. Not so fast.
It took almost four weeks before I managed to get another copy. I saw copies at Wal*Mart and Best Buy, but not at the game stores. Clerks told me it would be months before I’d get another one. I’d given up hope when finally I managed to get the last one of a new shipment at a Game Stop. It had the UPC code that meant it will probably break soon too, but it’s working for now.
I have horrible experiences at my local game stores all the time. I’ve begun shopping at Best Buy as much as possible (no trade-ins though). They tend to have better inventory and better customer service. Who would have guessed…
That sucks about their customer service. Most people never have to interact with personnel from online stores unless there is a problem, so they really should be working hard to keep the customer.