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Guitar Hero gives Xbox 360 the Whammy!

Opinion and Analysis

A download patch to fix the whammy bar on the X-plorer controller of Guitar Hero II is being blamed for “bricking” Xbox 360’s

No actual proof at this time, but there are reports floating around the net of Xbox 360 owners experiencing issues following the downloading of a patch from Red Octane, Guitar Hero II’s developer.

The patch fixes response issues with the whammy bar on the guitar controller, and was initially reported to be ‘several weeks’ away from delivery, but was made available recently.  A Red Octane spokesperson said;”The code in question (which has been around since GH1) waits until the whammy bar has returned to a rest position between notes before activating it for the next note. Otherwise, if you held the whammy bar down forever, the detune would kick in at the beginning of every sustained note and it would sound terrible. As people have noticed, some of the shipping Xbox 360 guitars have trouble consistently returning 100% of the way to the rest position, so I loosened up the test for the patch.Anyway, whether you consider it a software issue or a hardware issue, the important thing is that the patch fixes it. “

Having downloaded and installed the patch, some Xbox 360 owners are vocal that the fix is worse than the disease, with everything from ‘disc read’ errors right up to the dreaded ‘red circle of death’ (Xbox 360 failure indication) being reported.

Considering that the whammy bar provides nothing other than audio aesthetics in the game, with scoring not being affected by its use, iTWire is advising a wait and see approach to this patch until we know more.

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