Official XBox 360 Launch Thread

[Pedro]

Ok I'd really come to love my 360. I'd figured out the strategys and little nuances that saw me close to completing Perfect Dark on Perfect Agent, Call of Duty 2 looked stunning, Geometry Wars had my soul, not to mention all the online Halo 2 backwards compatability goodness....

Yesterday I became one of the unfortunate statistics that had their 360 break down long before its time. 1 min into gameplay of any DVD based game (although oddly it doesn't seem to be the DVD drive) sees the system crashing with no warning lights, either on a frozen screen, grey striped screen or a good old fashioned completely black one.

To put this into perspective I've owned in the past 18 years the following consoles (all of which work to this day):
Gameboy
Gameboy Color
Gameboy Advance SP
Nintendo DS
SNES
Nintendo 64
Gamecube
Dreamcast

I've owned a couple of others briefly but those are the ones I haven't sold, ALL are still working to this day, all but the Gameboy and SNES were bought at launch.

The 360 is a fantastic system but this isn't an isolated incident, someone from my course this monday had their machine die, atleast they got the red light warnings on the front. I would recommend to anyone considering picking up a machine to wait until microsoft have ironed the bugs out.

 

[ChrisReid]

To put this into perspective I've owned in the past 18 years the following consoles (all of which work to this day):
Gameboy
Gameboy Color
Gameboy Advance SP
Nintendo DS
SNES
Nintendo 64
Gamecube
Dreamcast

I've owned a couple of others briefly but those are the ones I haven't sold, ALL are still working to this day, all but the Gameboy and SNES were bought at launch.

That isn't a random sampling of game consoles and handhelds though. That's pretty much a list of the half dozen systems that are least prone to malfunction. That's no excuse for any 360 defects, but I don't think the situation here is much different from defects associated with the original XBox, various Playstations and other systems.

The 360 is a fantastic system but this isn't an isolated incident, someone from my course this monday had their machine die, atleast they got the red light warnings on the front. I would recommend to anyone considering picking up a machine to wait until microsoft have ironed the bugs out.

Mine had an issue as well. I called them Thursday, they overnighted a box to me on Friday. I took it to the post office, and since it was a three-day holiday weekend, it arrived on Tuesday. Microsoft sent out a new system Wednesday and I was playing again on Thursday. It's no fun to have your system conk out on you, but going without it for a week is better than holding off my purchase for a year. Next month Blazing Angels, Burnout 460, Ghost Recon 3 and Elder Scrolls/Oblivion come out. Those are just the neato ones I'm looking forward to.

 

[Pedro]

That isn't a random sampling of game consoles and handhelds though. That's pretty much a list of the half dozen systems that are least prone to malfunction. That's no excuse for any 360 defects, but I don't think the situation here is much different from defects associated with the original XBox, various Playstations and other systems..

True, I've briefly owned a PSP, XBox and PS2, I think the fact that I kept the 360 long enough to experience this failure is as much a comment on the fantastic launch (despite what many might say) as it is on poor workmanship. However it is curious that Nintendo have been so good with reliability (bar the initial release of the famicon) and no one else seems to be able to manage it. The number of faults is quite unacceptable, but having said that I remember at the launch of the PSX when Blockbuster used to rent out consoles being told not that they were all on hire but that they were all broken

Mine had an issue as well. I called them Thursday, they overnighted a box to me on Friday. I took it to the post office, and since it was a three-day holiday weekend, it arrived on Tuesday. Microsoft sent out a new system Wednesday and I was playing again on Thursday. It's no fun to have your system conk out on you, but going without it for a week is better than holding off my purchase for a year. Next month Blazing Angels, Burnout 460, Ghost Recon 3 and Elder Scrolls/Oblivion come out. Those are just the neato ones I'm looking forward to.

Thats what they've told me, hopefully the box will arrive tomorrow, well this morning now. Its certainly reassuring to know that they should live upto their promises. Customer support was very friendly and helpful.

 

[Worf]

Hrm. I managed to get an Xbox 360 Premium last week (!!!). All I did was walk into Best Buy, and ask the salesperson. Was stunned when she said "Yes, we do have them. Which one did you want?" and walked to the back and got one. They had 2 in stock, from a shipment a couple of days prior.

I bought it, but still haven't quite decided if I should keep it. It's one of those decisions that can wait since it can always be returned or resold easily (easier to find it first and make decision later, rather than make decision and wait forever to find it). Only reason I'm hesistant is because there aren't any games I'm interested in for it - other than what's in Xbox Live Marketplace.

BTW, for anyone in the know - is there any way to copy/back up the data on the hard drive? Seems if you accidentally delete say, Hexic HD, you can't get it back other than by buying another hard drive...

Also, if you buy a game from the Marketplace, can you download it again should you accidentally delete it? Or do you have to buy it again?

 

[ChrisReid]

BTW, for anyone in the know - is there any way to copy/back up the data on the hard drive? Seems if you accidentally delete say, Hexic HD, you can't get it back other than by buying another hard drive...

You have to be kind of a big doofus to accidentally delete a game. You could just copy it over to a memory card from a friend and transfer it back to your hard drive I guess.

Also, if you buy a game from the Marketplace, can you download it again should you accidentally delete it? Or do you have to buy it again?

Yeah, once you buy it, you can redownload it. This is so people without hard drives can still take advantage of this. All arcade games fit on a memory card, although some take up most of the card. So you can buy a bunch, and just delete the old one and download whichever one you want to play when you want to play it. But you're just as likely to step on your game discs and crack them into pieces as you are to accidentally delete them off the hard drive.

While the arcade stuff is nifty, and there's more neat stuff coming (I'll probably buy the downloadable online multiplayable Street Fighter 2 which they've announced), the best part for me are the high definition movie trailers and game demos. They have almost a dozen demos out so far, and there's about one new one released each week. I'm guilty of playing so many XBox 1 games for an hour or less, and this should really help me realize I don't want to buy something before I go out and do it. On top of that, when I take my system around, I can have a couple dozen demos for new high quality retail games on the hard drive for my friends and family to play. In that sort of situation we probably wouldn't play most games for more than 30-60 minutes as they try out each one, so it's as if I actually had a lot more games than I do. It should go without saying that downloading them and storing them on the hard drive is much much nicer than subscribing to some crummy magazine and dealing with demos on cover discs.

 

[Worf]

Actually, apparently a number of people have found some games corrupted their hard drives and they had to reformat. There's a nice thread about it trying to recover Hexic HD (which isn't downloadable) over at the xbox.com forums. Involves a trip to 1-800-4MY-XBOX, a 3-4 day wait (or more), and being at the phone when they call (can't have answering machine pick it up). I suppose if it becomes an issue, I'll get another drive, image it, and transfer the image to my existing drive.

But it's good to know one can download the games again. I haven't tried it out yet (hell, I'm still trying to determine if I want the xbox360), but it's good to know before I spent any serious change on it. That, and I didn't know you could copy the game off to a memory card (though - how do they protect against memory-card piracy?).

And yes, downloading demos is much nicer. While demo CDs and DVDs are nice, they suffer in that they take forever to load, and the demos you want to try are spread across all the demo discs you have (play demo A for 10 minutes, swap discs to play demo B... gets old *real* fast).

It also appears the old Xbox has Live Arcade as well, but not in as convenient a format (you have to find the "Xbox Live Arcade" "game", be a paid up member of Xbox Live, and each game has a higher price because they're billed in real money.

 

[ChrisReid]

But it's good to know one can download the games again. I haven't tried it out yet (hell, I'm still trying to determine if I want the xbox360), but it's good to know before I spent any serious change on it. That, and I didn't know you could copy the game off to a memory card (though - how do they protect against memory-card piracy?)..

It wouldn't be a complete surprise if there was some tiny string of code in there that tied your downloaded games to your gamertag/profile, but I kind of think they might not have even bothered. Nobody with a hard drive needs a memory card, and people with just a memory card can basically only store one arcade game on there. If a few people go out and buy a $40 card so that they can copy a few $5 Arcade games, Microsoft still wins.

It also appears the old Xbox has Live Arcade as well, but not in as convenient a format (you have to find the "Xbox Live Arcade" "game", be a paid up member of Xbox Live, and each game has a higher price because they're billed in real money.

And no demos. All the 360 Arcade games have a downloadable demo you can try first before you decide to go with it.