Red Rings of Death GET!
Well, it finally happened.
Knowing that my Xbox 360 was purchased about five or six months after Chief Oddball’s, I’ve been counting the days since his 360 died last year, awaiting my own console’s failure. It took slightly longer than I anticipated, but this morning while playing my rented copy of Lost Odyssey my console locked up, the screen displaying red criss-crossing lines. I tried booting the game up a few times after that (always with the same result) before getting the dreaded flashing red lights.
Of course, it only happened that one time. I can still power the thing up, but every game will inevitably lock up with the screen displaying a red checkerboard pattern, not unlike what Chief Oddball himself experienced. Resigning myself to fate, I called Xbox support. After verifying that neither the power supply nor hard drive were the problems (and registering my console, since I’d never bothered), the gentleman on the other line set me up for a free repair job (saying they’d call me if the problem was something than overheating hardware, which is very unlikely). So I’ll be getting my UPS box in 3-5 days, and then I probably won’t see my 360 again for months.
Good thing there aren’t too many 360 games out there right now that I’ve “gotta have.” Also, good thing I have three other gaming consoles to keep me busy if I need a gaming fix.
Still, it would have been nice if my well-ventilated 360 didn’t take a crap on itself. Oh well.
(Maybe this is someone’s poor idea of an early birthday present.)
Edit, 9:30PM: Okay, it’s completely dead now. Red ring all the way, baby.
Tagged as crap, Xbox + Categorized as Games/Console, Games
That’s utter suckage!
If there’s any good news in this, it’s that you should be getting back one with the “revised heatsink design.” I think every console they refurb gets that upgrade, and certainly all of the new ones have it. So far, that design upgrade seems to have prevented my replacement console from getting borked.
Remember you should be able check the status of your repair order online. I’m sure I mentioned the details somewhere in my old posts about my console going bad.
I recently read that some failure analysis firm estimates that the failure rate of the 360 might actually be as high as 30%…that’s insane…
Yeah, at least this is the traditional first-quarter lull in game sales; not much exciting out right now. Hopefully you’ll get a refurb back within a month, so you’ll have it when GTA IV comes out.
Yeah, I was kinda hoping that mine would escape the red ring of fate because I keep it in an open space, and that it’s fairly cool in here. Alas…
Hopefully the repair work will do the trick. If not, I guess I’ll save up for a new 360 at some point. Still, that’s an insane failure rate you quoted. My PS2 has been going strong for almost three years now; my original Xbox (which is even older) still runs fine, though the DVD tray is a little wonky. Heck, my original PS1 — while not in optimum working order — still mostly works, and it’s ten years old! I guess that’s the price you pay when you want your Next Gen console out the door like Microsoft did.
The dude on the phone made sure to tell me about my newly registered account and how to check my repair status, so I’ll definitely be making use of that.
Strangely enough, I haven’t really been too geeked about GTA IV. Heck, I never finished San Andreas — I think I got to the point early on where you have the gang wars (with handy color-coded mini-map) and just lost interest. I’ll be sure to read your thoughts on the game when the time comes, though; and if Reaper decides to get it, I can check it out that way too.
I hear you on the elder consoles — the only game console I ever owned that actually stopped working was my original PS1, and I have to discount that one anyway since it was a refurb. (I always have horrible luck when I buy refurb or open-box stuff for some reason.) Even my launch-day PS2 is still working, even though users reported lots of inherent problems with those early models.
Although the 360 is my favorite console, and has the game lineup that most appeals to me, I’m no fanboy — I acknowledge that the thing was designed like a high school electronics class experiment. And all so they could get it out the door ahead of the PS3. To Microsoft’s credit, it made their console a definite, viable player in the market (at least in this hemisphere — in Japan it’s still an utter failure). But PS3 market share is really starting to pick up now, since its game lineup is starting to get fleshed out a little.
You mentioned your console was in an open environment and well ventilated, but the problem you and I both had with our consoles isn’t entirely influenced by ventilation. The problem, as I read it, was shitty solder joints on the motherboard. As the console is turned on and off over time, and goes through all those “heat up / cool down” cycles, the expansion and contraction takes its toll on the solder joints until eventually they fail. It’s just crap quality control.
As far as GTA IV goes, I never finished San Andreas either (and I think I gave it up around the same point as you), but I like the sandbox gameplay enough to take a bite out of another installment. In the meantime, I just picked up Condemned: Bloodshot today, so I can get my survival horror fix. I think I love the Condemned games so much because of the focus on abandoned environments and urban exploration, which is another fascination of mine.
you are more than welcome to come over and play on the Wii anytime =D
as we speak, Reaper is sitting next to me playing Super Smash Brothers, every few minutes turning to me and saying “you know you wanna play…”
good luck, bro.
I totally should have kept your house key so I could let myself into your house whenever and play Wii to my heart’s content.
…And then embarrass myself in Wii Sports Baseball again by hitting more home runs batting right handed.
I miss playing the Wii. It was fun.
The Wii is great, particularly when you have multiple players in-house. I think I should get Super Smash Bros Brawl…