XBOX 360 Wire

Activision ignoring Xbox 360 Guitar Hero ‘Les Paul’ problems

• Got Guitar Hero 3?

• Got a working wireless guitar?

If you can answer ‘Yes’ to both questions, you are well and truly in the minority - well it would certainly seem that way given the number of complaints surrounding the new Les Paul guitars. The internet recently got into a bit of a tizzy when it was announced that the failure rate on Xbox 360 hardware was around 16% - though strangely not many outlets are reporting the huge number of faulty guitars doing the rounds.

Problems with the strum bar and fret buttons surfaced late last year, and not just Xbox 360 versions - PS3 and Wii packages are also badly affected.

I suffered problems with my own guitar almost as soon as the pre-order arrived. It didn’t bother me a huge amount to begin with, I just plugged in the older X-Plorer guitar to get around it. Playing multiplayer games was another story though - you have no idea (or perhaps you do?) how frustrating it can be when you are on the cusp of winning an expert Live match only to find your inputs stop responding and you rapidly fall behind the challenger.
I managed to fix my own Les Paul eventually. There are plenty of ‘how to fix’ posts on the internet though only some of them seem to work for any length of time. I instead decided a more permanent fix was needed and ended up butchering mine in the end.

So what is being done to resolve the issues? We contacted a number of people with broken guitars to see how they dealt with it - most of whom just returned theirs to the store for a replacement, only to find the same issue arising sometimes after only a few hours play.

Our original posting on the Guitar Hero 3 problems attracted a huge number of ‘googlers’ looking for a solution - even though it was posted a while back, people continue to find it in their search results and almost every day a new comment appears saying they have the same problems.

We took it a step further and decided to contact Activision directly to see what they had to say on the matter. Nothing is the answer - stoney silence. We sent emails and follow-ups to both their Support and PR functions (we even tried their Director of PR!) but have yet to get a response on the matter, this despite chasing it for a number of weeks now with repeated emails and attempted phone calls.

So it would seem Activision doesn’t really care about the situation - if you have a broken guitar you will just need to return it to the store and hope against all odds that you get a good one in return. Perhaps Activision are getting a little too big for their boots - will Activision become the new EA? We bloody hope not…

Activision - we are still waiting to hear from you.

Posted by Bleem - February 19th, 2008 -