Rock Band Gamers Boo Busted Guitars

Gaming forums are alight with complaints of broken "strum bars" on the Rock Band axe; developer Harmonix says it's identified the problem and promises to replace the glitchy guitars.

Wanna-be rockers began posting complaints about the glitchy guitars practically from the moment that the hot-selling game (read Chris Null's review) hit stores. Apparently, the plastic strum bar (which you flick up and down, as you would the strings of a real guitar) has been failing on a good percentage of the guitars that ship with the game; in some cases, the bar doesn't work on the down stroke, while for others, the bar stops working altogether after a few hours of play.

That's the bad news; the good news (as reported by Joystiq) is that Harmonix, the developer of Rock Band, has owned up to the problem and pledges to "immediately" send out replacements. You can visit this customer service page to request a new guitar.

In the meantime, I'm guessing that there's a lot of Rock Band boxes on store shelves with broken guitars (Harmonix says the problem will be fixed on all new shipments). So if you're looking to pick up one of the (mammoth) Rock Band boxes for the holidays, you might want to wait a week or two before making your move.

And if you're stuck with a bum guitar and waiting for a replacement, here's a couple of suggestions to tide you over:

• Some users are reporting that Guitar Hero axes work just fine with Rock Band; if you have an old GH guitar lying around, give it a try.
• A user on Hard Forum posted this workaround: "If you open up the guitar it's actually rather easy to fix the down strumming problems. What happens is a small piece of foam that returns the contact to its original position becomes compressed so that only a full down strum will create a circuit. I just put small folded piece of notecard between the foam and contact and it works perfectly now." I haven't tested it myself, but it's worth a shot.