Guitar Hero Tourney at Gamestop this weekend. Maybe.
When we got an e-mail from Gamestop telling us we should "get ready to rock" at a Guitar Hero II tournament this Saturday, we were stoked. When we followed the e-mail's direction to contact our local stores for more information, we were considerably less than stoked.
We called 10 of the 1659 stores listed as tournament hosts on the Gamestop web site, all in our local suburban Maryland area. Of those, only one store, in Wheaton Plaza, gave a vague answer about a tournament starting at 4:30 with registration throughout the week (the store manager had no information on format, prizes, or any other details).
Of the other nine stores, five said they weren't actually hosting a tournament, three said they hadn't heard anything about it, and one said they were postponing it because the manager was going on vacation that day. Of the stores that weren't hosting the tournament, the reasons ranged from lack of information and materials from Gamestop's corporate offices to lack of a PlayStation 2 demo kiosk to play the game.
We really like the idea of in-store tournaments -- they have the potential to bring gamers together in a social setting better than anything since the death of the arcade. But Gamestop needs to get its act together before promoting a major nationwide initiative like this.
