Well, that was extraordinarily frustrating

Santa brought Guitar Hero World Tour for the kids this year. It was unpacked and set up with much excitement...and then nothing, the game wouldn't start up, we couldn't get the PS2 to read the disc. Great. We know it's not the player, all the other games still work just fine.

Rather naively, as it turns out, we assumed that we could simply take the disc back and have it swapped for one that worked. HA! Oh foolish ones!

We took the disc in to EB Games at Hornsby and explained the situation. We were told that no, they couldn't just swap the disc, we'd have to bring in the whole bundle and by the way we don't have any replacement bundles in stock and we won't have any for anywhere from 2 weeks to who knows when. With steam coming out our ears we went home, with 3 kids in tow, packed up the whole box full of tricks and took it back to the shops.

We were kind of hoping that when confronted by the ginormous box with the packaging all messed up that the staff would come to their senses and decide that maybe just swapping the disc wasn't such a bad idea after all. (Though I'm pretty sure they'd have been out of stock of the disc only versions of the game too, most places seem to be sold out.)

Nope, they couldn't possibly do that, there was no way to enter such an action into their system (um, so don't enter it into the system?). In the course of me trying to persuade the staff to think outside the box (and maybe act like they give a shit about the whole thing) one of them finally asks had we been in touch with Activision, because apparently if there's a problem with anything to do with Guitar Hero there's a slip of green paper in the box that says you're supposed to ring Activision up and they'll send you a replacement part (which they're doing because there's been lots of problems and they don't want the stores to have to deal with doing lots of replacements). Um, no. We hadn't seen any green paper, what with the kids unpacking the box and all.

I turn to the guy who told us to bring the whole box in and suggest that it might have been nice if he'd mentioned that in the first place. He says he assumed we'd have known. Bullshit, when I told him we had a faulty disc it should have been the first thing he asked me.

So we take the box back to the car. After finishing our other shopping we head home. Adam goes to the Activision website. Yep, we can ring them- at $2.50 A MINUTE. Fuck that. The links for Guitar Hero support in the Asia Pacific region lead to a dead end with a drop down list asking what country you are from but without Australia as an option. After a bit lot of surfing around the site he discovers the crowning glory of this whole saga.

If necessary, take the game back to the point of purchase and exchange it for another disc.

Eventually we do find the green slip of paper. It specifically says to contact Activision for problems with Guitar Hero peripherals. Not the games discs.

The only reason I was willing to go through the contacting Activision route in the first place was because we'd have to wait for the shop to re-stock to get a replacement through them and I hoped Activision might be a little quicker getting a new disc out to us. Right at the moment I feel like printing out a copy of the trade practices act and throwing it at somebody.

We'll be ringing EB Games in the morning.