Last night, I tweeted about how much I love Okkervil River’s Sleep and Wake-Up Songs
It was around that time that my Xbox 360 froze, during a cut scene. I figured it was a fluke. My 360 is getting up there in years, and Dragon Age is a fairly meaty game.
I restarted the game from a save point 3 minute prior, and everything was fine. It then froze again, slightly later in the cut scene. Again, this was worrisome, but the system restarted fine.
This morning, I went to take Dragon Age from the system, and I was greeted by those three dreaded red lights, indicating total system failure.
Well, shit.
My Xbox has crapped the bed before. Two years ago, almost exactly. It was three weeks prior to the release of Rock Band, and the thought of not having my system for the launch of that game was somewhat devastating. Fortunately, I sent it off immediately, and got it back just in the nick of time.
This time, I’m not so lucky. As an early adopter (read: beta tester for faulty hardware), I purchased my 360 at launch. That was just about four years ago… Again, almost to the day.
For comparison, let me tell you the story of my Playstation 2. I scrimped and saved to buy it in the summer of 2000, the same year that Onimusha came out. Since then, it’s served me without complaint through three Final Fantasy games, four Silent Hill games, and countless other masterpieces. That’s 9 years without failure, remarkable for a system that was also plagued by astronomical failure rates.
Microsoft, in response to pending lawsuits, extended their warranty coverage for the Red Ring issue. For the first failure, I was safely under that umbrella. This time? Not so much.
What annoys me isn’t that the system failed. Yes, it was a preventable manufacturing flaw that left millions of faithful consumers in the lurch. BUT, Microsoft went above and beyond to make things right with those whose systems bricked.
No, what annoys me is that the system is so damned good, despite its frailty. If I hadn’t enjoyed playing it, I wouldn’t have purchased several games and made it the center of my multimedia setup.
As it stands, those games are being held hostage.
So, I’ll have to buy a new one. That’s disappointing, because every dollar I spend replacing this failed Xbox is a dollar I can’t spend on another system, or more games to review on the show.
I don’t know why I’m writing up an entry about this. At the top, you noticed that I linked to Amazon a couple of times. This is an effort to make some scratch off of their associate program. This money will go toward maintaining the site and covering hardware failures such as this one. Maybe this is my way of sneaking in more ads. If the presence of Amazon affiliate links bothers you, let me know in the comments. It seemed like a more noble alternative to putting up a beggar’s Paypal link.
I’ll have a new Xbox 360, complete with the seemingly infallible Jasper chipset, soon enough. In the meantime, I have to start digging through my PS2 and Wii backlog again.
On the plus side, I actually have games to talk about next week!