Well, 09.09.09 has come and gone. Yes, I got it. Yes, I played it. Yes, the game itself is absolutely mind-blowing. However, I sit at my desk, writing this rant / blog to you right now instead of playing it. Why is that? Read on.

Wednesday, at lunch, I went to the closest video game store, which is about a 10-15 minute walk from my job to there, to purchase The Beatles: Rock Band.  That's around 20-30 minutes coming and going, which left me about 10-15 minutes to eat. Anyway, I get there, buy the game with a huge smile on my face and happiness in my heart, and then make my way back to work in time for some Subway. At the end of the day, I make my way home, eat some dinner, and get on the X360 to play some Beatles goodness.

After watching the wonderful intro movie, I plug in my Turtle Beach headset into my controller and, after a few minutes calibrating my audio and video, I'm ready to rock. After selecting the Story mode, the game then informs me that no microphone is connected. I find this kind of weird, since I just connected my headset to my controller. So, I unplug everything and plug it back in. Same message. After a few minutes of swearing at the game and my headset, I decide to go and browse Rock Band's forums on their website to see if there is any information on this type of problem.

I come upon a thread about it and, after reading on, my face drops. The joy I felt during the day turned into frustration and anger. It seems that Harmonix has decided to alienate people who used their headsets to sing in previous games by completely abolishing them. Now, only USB microphones, or the Lips wireless microphones, will work. I would love to meet the person who came up with this brilliant idea and slap the living hell out of him or her. Some might say "Well, you know, people who will buy this type of game will already have USB microphones, so why are you complaining?" After reading some of the other post on forums around the web, including this very site, I can tell you that this is not entirely true. A lot of people still use their headsets to sing in music games, including me, and when Harmonix pulls this type of stunt, they forget about us, about those who don't have the money to purchase the entire boxed set of instruments.  That, to me, is unacceptable.

Nonetheless, now I'm going to buy Lips just so I can get those wireless microphones so I can play The Beatles: Rock Band, which means I'll probably have to skip on a title I wanted to get this year because of that. Although I'm tremendously pissed about this entire situation, I still enjoyed my time on the guitar with the game and cannot wait to sing through the story mode. One thing's for sure, this little misstep will affect my final review of The Beatles: Rock Band for sure. Check back soon for that.