And I stand by that. And it could have been SO GOOD AGH.

Basically, my friend got Rock Band 2 days ago, didn't have much of a chance to play it, and invited me and our mutual friend over to give it a shot. I was incredibly excited since the game was announced and was jumping with anticipation. I was stoked about drums and guitar obviously.(Not so much vocals, obviously)

So, after eating and running a few errands, we start setting up. We make a band, make a really fast bunch of created characters, and pick a song. I sit down and drummed my little heart out on expert, while my friends took up guitar. And instantly, something was wrong.

The bass pedal was being a temperamental ho-bag. I would prefer if the bass pedal would activate with just a weeee bit of pressure, but it wouldn't... half the time. Yes, with a certain amount of pressure, the bass pedal would activate when it felt like it. "No biggie, I guess", I thought to myself. Figuring I could just step a big harder on the pedal, I did just that. NOPE! Suddenly, my bass pedal started giving out double hits. Simple sections suddenly became a c-c-c-combo-breaking rampage. At this point, I had to find a pleasant median to hit the pedal. Which still only worked half the time. And that, right there, destroyed my enjoyment right off the bat. Sections with a lot of bass just became a score massacre.

In fact, keeping a combo was difficult regardless. The drums' angle can't be tweaked and the chair I was sitting on made me hit the sides quite a bit. Changing the height of the chair or drums didn't help at all. So, it was super lame! More combos broken, even during the easiest sections.

And here's something else that should have been fixed: Activating star power with drums makes the bass pedal line disappear. Yep. When you activate star power the play area shines a beautiful shade of gold. In fact, it's the same color of gold that the bass pedal lines are! Have fun seeing them during that 3 second span of sparkling beauty!

After the preliminary song, we were all pretty much annoyed. We were all missing a lot of notes. Especially using the Fender controller. We were playing on an HDTV, so we decided to tweak the lag offset. And because of this, I can complain about something else with the game!

The lag offset is a joke. A damn joke. Using the manual calibration on audio offset, we couldn't tell the difference between +55ms offset or -55ms. The audio was still hitting when the little blipper thing went past the icon. It was just shenanigans. Also, I've always had a bit of a vendetta against the normal lag calibration tool from GH2 and 3. Shouldn't there be a better way to test your lag and make sure it's properly calibrated?Imagine this: a section with a constant beat, that gave you a bunch of eigth notes to hit. After the initial section, the offset gets adjusted and the section replays, letting you try your new settings. As far as Rock Band goes, you can't test your current offset until you pick a song and mess around with it. IS THIS THE MAGIC NUMBER? FIND OUT! After the next song you play! After navigating a bunch of menus and waiting for load times. Not the right number? Change that offset to another 5-10ms up or down and try it again! Is it better? Worse? Who can say?

Another swell problem: The Guitar. It looks pretty cool, sure. But try playing a song with it. It makes me wonder if the R&D folks actually tested this guitar. It's that bad. The strummer feels like absolute garbage and loves giving random misses and double strums. Nobody was able to combo a song on this thing. Nooobody. Fast strumming? Eyyy! FORGET ABOUT IT!

And finally, the career mode, itself. It sounds like a cool idea on paper, but I hope you enjoy playing the same 10 songs over and over again for a while. If you're doing career, you're playing the same few songs until you lock another one or two. And then you're playing the same 11 or 12 songs. Then you unlock another one or two. Then you're playing the same 13-14 songs. Get the idea? It gets old. At least with Guitar Hero, you can go through career by only playing a song once. With Rock Band, you will probably have to play an opening song 20 times before you finish.(Pure guessing, but we played "Say it ain't so" about 5 times in a 3-hour span while unlocking only 3 songs.)

Now, I understand that some of you might be saying: GET THAT STICK OUT OF YOUR ASS AND ENJOY THE GAME. YOU FAGGOT. STOP WHINING. Well, first off, you hurt my feelings. Secondly, I think that a game is only fun when the hardware works. Imagine if you couldn't beat the first level of Mario brothers because of a faulty controller. That was bundled with the game. That was the only way to play the game. I could barely even get through all of these hardware/technical problems and even enjoy the music/charts. Is it wrong that I expect proprietary hardware to be polished and functional? That I expect it to have been thoroughly tested and revised until it is at the apex of reliability and function? The drums could have been so much better. The guitar could have been so much better. Hell, Red Octane's first Guitar Hero controller was leaps and bounds better than this controller. The fact that I could pinpoint so many unresolved problems after a single day of playing makes me want to cry.

I want to like this game, I really do. But in its current state, how the hell can I?