Monday, May 26, 2008

It was only a matter of time


My one escape from reality kicked me in the pants at the weekend with the infamous Red Ring of Death. Goodbye Grand Theft Auto. Goodbye whatever else I played on that thing (can't quite remember). Goodbye.

In terms of hardware failure for just about anything, like any piece of equipment from the Stone Age to now, the XBox 360 has got to be the worst piece of kit ever. Never have I heard so many stories of consoles dying. In fact, I always counted myself lucky being the only person I knew who didn't have a problem.

When I say 'always', I mean for the six months that I owned the console before the RRoD came my way. Six months. That's how long I got out of it. I could buy a 360, then find out I have seriously aggressive cancer all through my body and still outlive the piece of crap. They should warn you about that in the manual at least.

It has to be some sort of conspiracy. I just haven't quite worked out what it's about yet.


5 comments:

Andy Latham said...

It's a joke isn't it? I know a few people who have had the problem. I actually want to get one myself but am worried about having the same problem. I would think they had fixed it now wouldn't they? Maybe I should stick to my trusty simple Wii.

Toole said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Toole said...

You already bought it so you might as well have them replace it for free. I think I might have broke mine cause it never actually red ringed, but they replaced it no questions asked.

Unknown said...

my xbox 360 died 2 times in the first 6 months. It took 4 weeks both times to fix the damn thing. Apparently the only place in europe where they can deal with the RRoD is in Germany.

both times I believe it was the overheating problem described here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_360_technical_problems

both times! Why didn't they fix it the first time? Now it's been working ok, quite noisy, but it works. I just got GTA IV. So it better not break now!

Bitter Animator said...

Andy, it's definitely something to consider. The 360 seems ridiculously unreliable. This isn't something I could go through an infinite amount of times and yet it seems that people get into cycles of replaced 360s. There are other things to play.

That said, there are great games on it as long as the console actually works.

Yeah, Tool, I'm getting them to replace it, which is nice I guess...

I have heard improved models are coming at some point but whether the problem will be solved remains to be seen.