Gaming Once More Takes Hold

Guitar Hero: World Tour came out. I had reserved it at Best Buy, and excitedly tore the box open and built the instruments within only to find that my drum kit does not work. The "control panel" does, so I can navigate menus within the system and the game, but the drum pads, cymbals, and foot pedal do not. The guitar is great, and so is the microphone, but I emailed Activision's support...website asking what I should do about the drums. My supreme hope is that I'm doing something wrong, and they can tell me how to fix it. I don't want to wait lord-knows-how-long for a replacement kit, only to find that IT doesn't work either (these things happen to me). Despite the malfunctioning percussion section, World Tour is awesome. The songs are fantastic, the guitar riffs are awesome, and I feel like they were finally able to craft the character models they'd always wanted to use. There's nothing quite like playing the lead guitar on a master recording of Michael Jackson's "Beat It."

In Playstation Network news, Yoda was made available for Soul Calibur IV, a move we always knew would happen, given that obviously-placed blank square on the character roster, right between Vader and Starkiller. I imagine that 360 owners can look forward to Vader on the Xbox Live Arcade. Yoda plays very differently than the other characters in that he's extremely short and surprisingly fast, and I can see how a skilled Yoda player could really spam that advantage.

More importantly, a game I never thought I'd be able to play finally arrived on the PSN: Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipise of Darkness: Episode 1 is just $15. I loved the demo, but alas, my own computer was unable to run the tech-heavy game, so I languished in agony, thinking I'd forever miss out on this very funny game. Well, now I can. I played Precipise for like two hours last night and loved every second of it.

And on Tuesday, Fallout 3 comes out. No rest for the weary!