Ardent Meridian

I wrote recently about the Ion "Drum Rocker" I had purchased, partially in response to a broken Rock Band drum pedal, and the excellent experience I had, and am having, with it.

However, as there are options to repair or replace the original pedal, and it was the "only" thing "wrong" with my original drums, I spent some time looking at those options with the intent of fixing the pedal, and giving the old drums to a friend.

That’s my broken pedal above, snapped clean off at the hinge.  A little research research pointed to two primary options for getting my broken Rock Band drum pedal fixed, and several more for a complete – and more expensive – replacement:

• The first was to go through the official warranty/repair process, which is probably the route most people would go.  However, assuming a simple swap of the broken pedal for a new one, this is just going to lead to the same problem occurring again somewhere down the road.
• The second was a third-party solution, either replacing or repairing the existing pedal.  The options I found for this looked like they would result in both a more solid and durable end-result, and a better looking one as well.

I opted to repair my existing pedal, partly because that option was slightly cheaper, and partly because the premium replacement pedals look like they might even be upgrades to the "Drum Rocker" pedal!

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A long time ago, way back in the distant annals of history (otherwise known as late-2002), I bought a rather entertaining Xbox game called "Steel Battalion".  This was a first-person Mech game with two rather interesting differentiators:

• It cost $200 – the same price as the console it ran on.
• It came with an enormous, and insanely cool, controller.

The controller in question was a glorious three-console plus foot pedal monstrosity, solidly built and quite the thing of beauty (if you like that sort of thing).  The image doesn’t nearly give the true scale of the thing.

In addition to being unique and having a certain amount of bizarre geek-status, the other interesting aspect to owning this game was its tendency to cause everyone you knew to question your sanity.

"$200 for one game!?", was the typical first response.  Okay, actually "WTF" was often the first response, but the first response not comprised solely of consonants was the "$200?!" one, but I digress.

I suppose, at a time when the Xbox console itself was only the same price as the game, it might have seemed a little odd.  But in terms of people questioning the sanity or value of the thing … well that’s a little bit different …

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