I’ve also recently become a reluctant owner of a BlueShark pad by choice. Yeah, basically there’s enough bad things about this purchase that puts it below the “proud owner” line but it’s good enough to stay above the “return merchandise” line.
The long and short about the pad itself: it’s obviously build with arcade dimensions. Touts a patent-pending arcade sensor (it is pretty good). There’s a bar that comes with it (hence the two holes in the back) but it’s wobbly and something I didn’t plan to use in the first place (since I’m storing the thing under my bed). It’s about 80lbs and to move it around I had to use furniture movers (as seen in the picture) but this means the thing won’t wobble around as I play. The metal finish is only skin deep – it’s all plywood underneath the finish.
The process of getting the thing wasn’t the most happy thing in the world. When I first got the pads it didn’t come with a control box, the thing that hooks the pad to a PS2. The customer support e-mails are… lacking, and written mostly in Engrish. Even when they promised to send the missing stuff right away, the whole ordeal just feels so… flaky.
So after a whole week of no show for my missing parts, I finally got my hands on a customer service phone number (that is not posted on the official website) and got my problem resolved… in one day.
Well, the pad is really nice and solid – I can do all the fancy spins and try to challenge the 10-12 foot range without a bar, but… I ran into the whole pad miss / sensor goes dead problem. I’m not the first customer to have this… long story short, there’s a chance in the middle of playing a song where the pad just dies. No step registers. You just fail the song instantly after that if you’re playing anything resembling difficult. When it happens, it’s really not fun… when it doesn’t though, it really is a solid DDR platform that rivals the arcade one.
So yeah, definitely not recommended for you to get one, especially if you bother to check the price tag, which I’ll not list here…