So . . . I bought "the Batmanime" the other day in glorious BluRay. Excellent disc, great bonus content (including bits that Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion are doing voices in next year's Wonder Woman feature-length animation). BluRay anime has definitely got me convinced too - damn, it was pretty on my stepdad's TV upstairs . . .
Other than that, since I saw it at Best Buy . . . and since I've been looking for one for a while . . . I bought the Icon 3rd party guitar controller for PS3 which works for both Rock Band and Guitar Hero 3. I've finally found my 3rd party guitar . . .
. . . and it sucks. Really hard.
Icon's GUITAR EVOLUTION II must be a new player to the 3rd party peripheral game. Up until now it was Nyko's Frontman or TAC's (extremely late-releasing) Widowmaker. Neither of these (save the Wii Frontman) are ever in stores. Well, Icon's guitar was. And it was cheap. So I gave it a shot not expecting much.
So yeah . . . first off, the actual guitar. It's light, feels cheap, the strumbar has an uncomfortable looseness to it, fret buttons feel a little sticky and unresponsive at times, but more often than not do the job . . . in general it does hold well enough as say the GH Les Paul . . . but yeah. Not quite up to par on the quality level. Understandable. What's unacceptable, though, was how ridiculously hard it was to open the battery port! Like most wireless guitar controllers, there's a back-panel that screws in to hold batteries (4 AA). They were 2 phillips' head screws . . . and they were horrible! Like, just too big to be able to use "electronics" screwdrivers, but also too shallow to use a normal phillips' head! I ended up using a small electronics flathead to unscrew it. And THEN I found out that the conductor spring inside actually made the thing spring OUT batteries once you put them in! So that was a careful and unnecessarily annoying ordeal . . .
How about the dongle? Well, the one cool thing was that it had plugs for either PS3 or PS2, and the dongle has a switch for selecting either "Rock Band" or "Guitar Hero". So here's the rub: the dongle HAS to be plugged into the 1st player slot AND has to be plugged in before you turn on the system. Otherwise, the thing won't properly recognise the guitar as a guitar controller. Lame.
Wanna know the biggest rub, though? This guitar is designed with 10 fret buttons just like the Rock Band guitar. The higher fret buttons (or lower, depending on how you look at it) basically allow you to finger-tap through solo sections in Rock Band. Excellent thing for fast parts. That's the whole point to the 2nd set of fret buttons.
The Guitar Evolution II? Yeah, those are just a 2nd set of fret buttons that still act like normal fret buttons. I guess this means that one'll be the bass guitar . . .
So yeah. Total piece of garbage. Not completely broken, but not nearly a quality product like the label-made ones. Buuuut, it DOES work for both games . . . so I guess for now I'll just let that slide.
So yeah. I gots a full band now. Who's comin' over?
In other news, if you haven't suggested what I should use for the following year's avatar yet, you should do that. You've still got a few days.
