(First, a little back story)
Friday on my lunch break, I caved in and bought a copy of Grand Theft Auto IV. I told myself that I wasn't going to give in to the hype. I tried to remind myself that I'll only drive around and kill people as long as I can still get a chuckle out of it, I'll never play the missions and then I'll go back to COD4 or something else. $60 wasted, I'm an idiot yet again (thanks, Rock Star). But I read so much in so many places about how the game is must-see, must-play stuff and I hate missing out on what has become my generation's milestone media events because let's face it, the fucking film industry is completely creatively bankrupt and no one will ever make a Casablanca or Citizen Kane for my age set (unless it's another god damned stinking remake).
So to savor the moment and really, truly appreciate the game I set aside most of my Friday night to devote time to it. I brought it home, hung out with my roommate, made dinner for my roommate, myself and my girlfriend, and ignored it. I ignored the game until I could get dinner and some allergy medicine and some coffee so I could really spend a nice chunk of my Friday night with the game. I popped in the game, sat down on the couch and waited. The moment the loading screen came up for chapter 1, "The Cousins Bellic," the game froze.
Odd, I thought to myself, but not a deal breaker. My Xbox (the swanky black 360 Elite, mind you!) has frozen two or three times as a fluke since I've owned it. I bought it at the end of September, so going on seven months of ownership it was acceptable in my mind to have had one or two hardware hiccups. No big deal, let's just reboot the console.
And there it was. The fabled Red Ring of Death.
On a Friday night. At 8:30pm. With no other plans. Xbox owners know what I'm referring to here -- others may want to read up.
After screaming my usual "you have got to be fucking kidding me," throwing the controller on the couch and kicking the wall a few times, I stormed off past my girlfriend and my roommate (who were in stunned silence at this point) to find my warranty information. I was going to Best Buy that instant, God damn your eyes, and that was final.
No such luck, because I couldn't find it. Plan B -- call Best Buy Customer Care (a term best used loosely). The ever-so-robotic CSR on the line told me I never purchased one, so after calling shenanigans and having him prove it or defeat me in single combat, he proved that I never purchased a replacement warranty by pulling up my credit card receipt.
Okay, Plan C (which doesn't involve any hand-to-hand combat) is to follow the same route a friend of mine has followed -- five times -- call Xbox Support, have them send me a prepaid cardboard coffin, send off my sexy Xbox Elite's desiccated corpse to the Temple of Micro$haft, wait 2-3 weeks for its resurrection, and hopefully have my rather extravagant purchase returned to me in working condition.
Fucking bollocks, I say.
I say bollocks because I can't find an American slang word that conveys my disgust strongly enough. It's not enough to say that what Microsoft is offering me as a solution is bullshit, because it doesn't sound quite right. In order to really understand my dismay, you have to imagine a rather large and unhappy Cockney spitting the words at you. Fucking god damned bollocks, mate.
So, okay. Let me get this straight. Microsoft, arguably one of the most powerful, if not the most powerful computer software producer on Planet Fucking Earth, have made their own gaming console. This console, for all intents and purposes, is a Windows Media Center PC. This Windows Media Center PC has been noted, by sources both internal and external, to be both unreliable and faulty in both construction and operating system management and that is acceptable as a fucking excuse? With any other faulty product, you'd expect a refund. With Microsoft -- the Tentacled Monolith of Technology, they repair your faulty brick and after you wait a month, you get it back and pray it doesn't brick again for some altogether mystical reason. But don't you fret, they send you a postage-paid box to send it off in.
The reasons listed for why an Xbox would RROD on you reach an ominously high number. When asked, a supposed "insider" is quoted as saying,
"RROD is caused by anything that fails in the "digital backbone" on the mother board. Also known as a core digital error. CPU, GPU, memory, etc. Bad parts, incompatible parts (timing problems) bad manufacturing process (like solder joints), misapplied heat sinks or thermal interface material, missing parts, broken parts, parts of the wrong value, missed test coverage. Any one or more, on any chip, or many other discrete components, would cause this."
This person goes on to say that excessive heat and DVD drive failure were significant design flaws overlooked in order to push the console out the door to beat Sony to market.
Go ahead and mull that over. The Xbox 360 was not rushed to market to get it into your greedy little hands. The Xbox 360 was rushed to market, with obvious and glaring design flaws, to beat Sony to the punch. Well, that's nice. Now Sony's laughing because almost no one has bricked their Playstation 3, and they're finally catching up with solid game releases.
Another thing that kills me is, after hearing all the stories of folks having their Xbox shit the bed I didn't think it could happen to me because I'm not doing the things they say cause console failure. My console is not used for more than 6-8 hours at a time. It is located in a reasonably well ventilated area. I do not mistreat my game discs, and I don't feel like I overtax the hardware's capability. Having been a PC gamer for over 15 years I'm fully familiar with the idea of not having enough machine to run a certain game. But when it's stated in more than one interview or blog that a game, graphics heavy or not, designed for a uniform piece of hardware could be the cause of hardware failure, that's fucking completely out of order.
If I buy a game specifically designed for a given console, I expect that console to be able to run it. I'm not a retard -- I'm not trying to shoe horn a copy of Super Mario 64 into my Super NES. I'm not trying to get Gears of War to run on a PS2. I purchased an Xbox 360 game for my Xbox 360 console, and given that Rock Star designed the fucking thing with Xbox 360 hardware in mind, I'm fairly certain that the fucking Xbox 360 should run it! I didn't know that some games take up more GPU bandwidth so, God help me, I'm gonna crash the console by playing a game marketed for the console!
I can't really think of anything that represents a bigger consumer cock-slap than this. And Microsoft didn't start sending out boxes for you to send off your unit to repair it until a year or two ago -- hasn't the Xbox 360 been out for close to five years now? I might be wrong about that. My main point, and I doubt that there will be people who disagree but I'm always open for debate -- is that a company as large as Microsoft should be extremely fucking ashamed for marketing a console that fails pretty widely across the board even when being used well within normal guidelines and common fucking sense, and the fact that they pay for you to send it to them for repair does not now, nor will it ever make reparations for their planet-sized error in quality.
I'll post a recap when my Xbox finally makes its journey, and when it returns. Don't worry -- you'll hear about it if the fucking thing RRODs again, because I'll make a blog post with photos of me setting the stupid thing on fire and going to my local retailer to buy a PS3.
Which definitely will have a warranty purchased for it.
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