I was looking forward to the next few weeks of gaming. Along with Catan, there was continuing rocking, a fairly extensive update to Crackdown that I was waiting for and the Halo 3 beta, for which I have two invites. Then came the XBox Spring Update. I should have known that something wasn’t entirely right when, several minutes after installing the auto-update, the XBox 360 froze inside the new marketplace blade in the dashboard. But I brushed it aside, downloaded the demo for Double Dragon, dicked around with that for a while (it hasn’t aged well!) and went to sleep.
It wasn’t until it froze during Guitar Hero II today that I started to get concerned. I rebooted. Started a song again and… froze. I rebooted again but instead of that familiar XBox bumper I was greeted with darkness and three flashing red lights. FUCK. The spring update killed my XBox. I am now one of the three percent (3% my ass).
I’ve heard all the (many, many) XBox 360 horror stories but dismissed most of them. “That couldn’t happen to me,” I’d say “I’ve been fortunate with my consoles.” My Playstation 2 (the previous holder of the ‘buggiest piece of shit console’ crown) never gave me problems; neither did the original Playstation; my SNES, now sixteen years old, still works; as do my, older still, NESes and TG-16. Yet, here is a console barely eleven months old — and that’s the fortunate part of the story, it’s still under warranty — dying on me.
It seems as though within a month, all that good fortune that I had accumulated was turning on me. In that time, I’ve had my home PC’s motherboard blow, my work PC’s motherboard blow (before this, I’ve never lost a computer!), my radiator started leaking, broke two pairs of headphones, locked-up my mp3 player a couple of times and lost or broke four of my jacket’s buttons. It seems as though anything that I touch breaks. This makes me think twice about masturbation.
My little soundtrack for broken computers was more apt than I thought. sigh again. With my dampened spirits I splurged online buying a hundred bucks worth of t-shirts, including some happy Katamari shirts. It’s a small consolation, but at least the t-shirts won’t stop working.
no broken T’s? ha - they can shrink, the graphics can fade or crack … you can grow out of them (or they out of you). It’s a sad realisation - but everything breaks.