Guitar Hero World Tour: The Best, The Worst, and Everything in Between

Drum Hardware Way Ups and Way Downs

Downs first: physical problems. Yes we have them.

First and foremost: the kick pedal sucks. And beyond that it sucks worse than the RB kick pedal. There is no excuse here. Allow me to elaborate.

The pedal is built out of a much more flexible plastic than the RB pedal. This will probably mean less breakage as it has some give to it. On the down side, if you thought the RB pedal was squishy, you haven't seen anything yet. The GHWT pedal is ... I'm having a hard time thinking of polite words to replace sucks. Sorry. It just sucks.

Unlike the RB kick pedal, it doesn't have any sort of anchor or attachment to the rest of the kit, and it doesn't have any of its own anchoring devices. This means it will slide away from you. Horribly. No matter what. Our solution is seriously to turn the kick pedal sideways with the base facing left (for a right footed person) and step on the base with your left foot and hold it there. Then play the top of the pedal with the ball of your right foot. Obviously you play off the pedal, very literally. It works, but it's still not anywhere near ideal. If you want to build something, you can make a more permanent solution like nailing it to a platform that extends under the drum throne.

Here's another problem. Because of the flexibility of the pedal and the fact that it only has one point of contact with the bottom of the pedal (where the sensor is), it wobbles from side to side very easily. This is not something you need to deal with while playing a kick drum. A little off center and it's all over. Fast double hits are MUCH harder with this kick pedal and I would not recommend it for anyone. Ever.

Okay, enough about the pedal.

We've heard about the fact that people are complaining that some GHWT kits have sensitivity issues, that Activision has confirmed this, and that they will be releasing a kit or instructions or something to tune sensitivity. We may have this issue, and it might be tainting our view of the rest of the kit. Our trouble is that when playing the pads, sometimes the cymbals trigger due to vibration. And we don't play hard and never had this issue with any RB kit. At the same time, if we don't play the pads hard enough they don't register. So it's nearly impossible to play songs well even if you don't miss a note with either hits not registering or cymbal hits showing up because of vibration. It's really frustrating.

So we'll deal with that, and I will write a blog post at some later date to elaborate on whether or not adjusting the sensitivity of the pads fixes it. We hope it does, but that still doesn't fix the layout issues and other usability issues we have with the GHWT drum controller implementation.

So all that sounded pretty bad. And it kind of is. There's just no getting around that. But we've got one more really great thing to report on. The saving grace of the GHWT kit if you will.

It's got a midi input. This means you can connect an electronic drum kit to it and play GHWT with it. Now, we haven't tested this yet ourselves, but I should get the chance to use a Roland TD-8 on it soon. Again, future blog post. The other thing we suspect will work that may or may not is using the midi input with Rock Band 2. If this is, in fact, possible, our recommendation will be that anyone with an electronic kit should pick up the GHWT drums to use as a midi-to-XBox converter.

Yes Please? (Roland TD-12, image courtesy wikipedia.org)

This could also mean easy cheating for GHWT though, as you can hook a drum machine or sequencer up to GHWT and very easily program in a song. Again, this is untested by us. But the functionality is there. We'll definitely post something when we get the equipment we need to test it.