Dropped by Best Buy tonight to preorder LittleBigPlanet and pick up some new blu-ray releases. The Pirates of the Caribbean Trilogy and also maybe probably Speed Racer. They had neither in stock. I cannot even imagine how something like that can happen, not having adequate supplies to last out the week, but I appreciate how tall the ceiling is in there so I'll let Best Buy slide.
I did place the LittleBigPlanet preorder, which actually gets you an empty game case. I'm not sure if all/most of Best Buy's preorders run like that. Does this mean that on October 21st, they'll hand me a naked disk and manual... or am I going to get another case, a normally boxed LittleBigPlanet? Regardless, I now have my Nariko costume code, and assuming Best Buy doesn't pull a Toys R Us and screw this up, I'll be right there for LBP's exclusive first-week-only free downloads. I already love this game.
And because it makes no financial sense to walk into Best Buy and only spend $5 on an empty game case, I impulse-shopped the Official Rock Band Drum Kit Silencers. Now, this is a bit of a stretch for me, because I generally dislike this sort of aftermarket garbage, even if it is officially licensed. But those drums on my Day One kit are loud, and it really does bug me after a while. So I jumped. I mean, if I booger up my drum kit, I can always buy the new one when it comes out.
As I cut the death plastic open, I received my first shock. These things STINK. It's an outstandingly foul oily plastic scent. Like you made a Creepy-Crawlie out of mostly gasoline. However, they do look and feel quite nice.
You can tell this is a photo I stole from somebody else, because those logos are not properly fucking centered.
But I'm ahead of my story with that pic... because my second shock was that the back of each of the silencers was covered in adhesive. I guess I don't know what I was expecting... maybe some kind of insert that only covered the gray area? But giant stinky sticker was not really on my radar.
Then the third shock: these official, standard-size, universal rubber drum pads do not fit the kit. I sat there trying to position the red pad so that it curved nicely along the inner ridge of the black border, but no matter how I tried to align it, it lurched off the other side.
So I did what impulse shopping hates, I checked the internet.
Found this review from Rockbandmods.net. "You should notice that the pads are not designed to sit inside the black rings, instead they should fit nicely inside the notch around the black ring of each drum pad." Well, they don't. But this bit further on worried me even more:
"The sound dampening qualities seem to be on par with the Drum Mutes Mod, which is quite good. However on my EL set, much like the Vic Firth mutes, the responsiveness went down the tube when these were applied. I was missing notes left and right on songs I can FC blind folded and was able to only manage to scrape together a four star run at best."
So... what? You'll miss notes with these things? Um, how about not. The reviewer then goes on to give the product a four out of five. Whoa whoa whoa. How can something that wrecks the game get a solid B recommendation? It's great that your drum kit is quieter now, but whuh-oh, you now play for shit?
Turns out, there's EL sets and QM sets, referring to the serial numbers. I have an EL set, and the pads work better on the QMs, because the QMs are newer models that Harmonix tweaked the sensitivity to make the drums more responsive. I suppose the 4/5 is more for the QMs.
So I thought about it for a bit. And I decided to try to install them anyway. Despite the semi-permanent adhesive, despite the potential for killing my drumming score. Like I said, I can always buy the new Rock Band 2 kit. Plus, I almost never get to play the drums... because when Clark's around for Rock Band, he usually wants the drums... and when he's asleep, they're too damn loud.
In the process, I sort of figured out why the pads seem to be larger than the black drum border. Because they end up affixing themselves on a curve, starting in the center of the pad and then lifting up to cover the rim. You can see the slight curvature in the picture above. It still doesn't "fit nicely inside the notch around the black ring of each drum pad" however. It covers it.
And then I had to test it. I started with some easy songs, like "Gimme Shelter," and scored higher than my previous record. I did a couple medium songs and experienced no issues there either. And since my drumming skills pretty much top out at medium, I called the experiment a success.
I suppose I learned a lot tonight.
Mostly I learned that Best Buy didn't stock enough copies of blue-ray Speed Racer.
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