Giant Bomb Video Game News

While all around me has been chaos, I've had a pretty good run with my Xbox 360 hardware. While everyone was running around like maniacs, investigating the Xbox 360's supposedly shoddy hardware, I was sort of quietly hanging out at home, getting achievement points and wondering what the big deal was.

Well, today's the day I join the rest of the world. My 360 Elite decided that the multiplayer mode of Quantum of Solace was too much for it to handle, so it locked up, filling the screen with a checkerboard pattern of static. I got it to come back up after that, but it locked up while I was looking at my avatar. After that, it refused to acknowledge that I had the Bond game installed to the hard drive of my 360 and tried to run it off the disc. So I deleted the installed game and went to reinstall it. At around 25 percent, the 360 essentially said "dude, what did I tell you about this James Bond nonsense? He's a spy! Shouldn't he be doing spy stuff instead of running around in a first-person shooter? Going third-person when you take cover doesn't count, either! That's just so they can show off their Daniel Craig model! I swear, this is all GoldenEye's fault!" Then the screen went black.

Red rings, baby. Three of 'em.

I... might be putting words into my 360's now-silent mouth. I can't remember for sure, everything happened so fast.

The awesome part about having it break tonight is that the Microsoft customer support center is currently working on upgrades. So you can't register consoles or file new repairs until tomorrow. When it rains, it rains, brothers and sisters. When it rains, it rains.

Oh, pours? Well, whatever. You get what I'm saying.

This is the first 360 that I've owned that's given up on me, but I guess it's technically my second or third Xbox. Weirdly enough, the console I got a week or two before the system's official launch is still totally trucking, despite it now being used as a mobile loaner to friends whenever someone else's stops working. Speaking of which, Ryan, I need my Xbox back. My Japanese 360 is still going strong, I think. I don't know, I never really use it. Though I did buy Raiden IV when we were in Tokyo... guess I could finally bust that out and give it a try. Whatever, I'm going to bust out my launch-era PlayStation 1 and swap trick it to play some Tobal 2. Now that's a game, damn it.

To add injury to annoyance, that now-broken console is whitelisted for the NXE preview. So if I slap that hard drive onto any other system, it'll take the NXE update and be unable to get online for the next two weeks. That means I need to figure out where my old 20GB drive is and find a memory card, since memory cards apparently won't transmit the NXE updates to other consoles.

Whatever, I won't cry and moan about it, since everyone's been hearing people bitch about the 360 hardware issues for years now. I think that's one part of all this that worked out in Microsoft's favor--the problem went on so long and got so bad that everyone got fed up with all the people complaining about it more than they got fed up with the actual hardware issues.

Still... pretty bad timing. Oh well, I didn't really want to spend the rest of the night playing Quantum of Solace, anyway. Seems kind of dry.