This is not good… no, this is not good at all!
I was just sitting down to continue plowing through Darkest of Days for a review when all of a sudden the Red Ring of Death, as you can see above, killed off my Xbox 360… again… for the third time. It was the weirdest thing, too. The game booted up and played just fine for a moment, then I had to pause the game to get something real quick, returning to find that the game had locked up. I rebooted and, again, everything started just fine. Then the game glitched out again with an odd buzzing sound when I went to load my save point, and when I tried restarting again I was greeted by the Red Ring of Death’s ominous glow. My heart sank, though I was hardly surprised.
So, unless Microsoft’s turnaround time on repairs/replacements has improved since my last RRoD, it looks like all Xbox 360 coverage plans for the holiday season are pretty much shot at this point — the timing of this really couldn’t be any worse.
Thankfully I was able to at least polish off Section 8, Raven Squad and a couple XBLA titles before my system kicked the bucket (reviews coming soon), and frankly, there isn’t a whole lot in the way of exclusives coming to the 360 for the rest of the year. Won’t be easy missing out on MagnaCarta 2, Forza 3 and Dreamkiller, though, and I was finally just able to track down a copy of Halo 3: ODST, so it’ll be painful having that sitting on my desk with no console to play it in.
Matt Litten is the full-time editor and owner of VGBlogger.com. He is responsible for maintaining the day to day operation of the site, editing all staff content before it is published, and contributing regular news, reviews, previews and other articles.
Matt landed his first gig in the video game review business writing for the now-defunct website BonusStage.com. After the sad and untimely close of BonusStage, the former staff went on to found VGBlogger.com. After a short stint as US Site Manager for AceGamez, Matt assumed full ownership over VGBlogger, and to this day he is dedicated to making it one of the top video game blogs in all the blogosphere.
Matt is a fair-minded reviewer and lover of games of all platforms and types, big or small, hyped or niche, big-budget or indie. But that doesn't mean he will let poor games slide without a good thrashing when necessary! 
Well, from what I heard about Darkest of Days, it was either kill your console or kill your desire to ever play a game again! 😀
Crap, though … that is lousy!
It’s actually not too bad, at least not as bad as some of the really harsh reviews I’ve seen. Main problem is the targeting is a bit off and the guns generally aren’t that exciting. But from what I got to play the time-traveling premise at least kept me interested. I’d actually put it between both the other FPSs I mentioned- not as good as Section 8 but probably better than Raven Squad.
Well Matt, I’m kind of in the same boat. I’ve been having problems off and on getting my 360 to actually play games instead of giving me the “dirty disk” error. Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 would give me this error two or three times before it would finally start. Well tonight the disk drive finally must have croaked because I can’t get it to play any games. Dirty Disk errors all around.
I’m not sure what I’m going to do. Seems simple enough to fix, and the new drives cost about $40, however I have a first-gen Xbox which has already been in once for repairs earlier this year for the red rings. I’m wondering if I might be better off biting the bullet and picking up one of the 120gig 360s that are coming up for sale every other day on various websites.
Your 360 was trying to help you out by making sure you didn’t play anymore of that absolutely awful game! LOL
Hopefully, you’ll still be able to play Borderlands when it hits next week!!! WOOT WOOT!!!
Also, hello, Zach!
Hey guys, long time no see 🙂
Sorry to hear about your 360 woes Zach. So much for the supposed improved hardware. Biggest piece of shit of a console ever made, it truly amazes me how unreliable the 360 hardware still is all these years after its launch.
And as for Borderlands, was planning to get that on PS3 so no worries there. I play pretty much all multi-platform games on my PS3 at this point.
Matt – off-topic, but I’m surprised that you choose PS3 for multi-platforms since the multiplayer is generally inferior, and many reports have shown that the PS3 is the worst version, most times with inferior graphics as well due to the porting difficulties.
As for Borderlands … yeah, looks good (PC me for that!)
Well, a lot of that is old misconception if you ask me. Online play isn’t any different from my experiences, people usually just say it is because they have more friends on Xbox Live and Xbox 360 just seems to have taken on this title as the best console for multiplayer. I’ve personally never seen how PSN is in any way inferior to Xbox Live — both have their ups and downs. I’ve actually had more problems getting disconnected on Xbox Live than PSN myself, and it’s supposed to be more stable since I’m paying for the service…
As for the whole graphics thing, that really isn’t an issue any more. Ghostbusters has been really the only recent game I can think of to have a “gimped” PS3 version. There are still some out there (Bayonetta is getting a lot of negative hype right now for being worse on PS3, but that’s because Platinum outsourced development to Sega), most of the other noticeably bad PS3 ports were early on, like FEAR and such. And the gimped versions are generally balanced out with enhanced ports that are better than they were on the 360, like Eternal Sonata, BioShock, the two Ninja Gaiden Sigma titles, etc. And Batman: Arkham Asylum, the PS3 was clearly the lead platform on that. So again, I think a lot of folks overstate the PS3 multi-platform woes based on sloppy ports during the console’s first year or two.
Honestly, the PS3 is just a far better platform to me across the board, so I play it over the 360 whenever I can.
Cool – thanks for clearing up my non-console cluelessness! 🙂