This evening I had some potatos in the oven, I was boiling some water to put corn in, and I turned on My XBox 360 (which has become my defacto DVD player) to queue up disk 2 of Entourage Season 6 which just arrived from Netflix today. Only instead of Vinny, Ari and the boys, I am greeted with this unpleasantness. (Not the cord dissaster geniuses, I plugged the 360 back in after I unhooked everything for the picture) I'm referring to the E73 error message. That's as far as my XBox would go. You can't see it from this picture but the top left quarter circle of the power LED is red and blinking. I looked up this error and it means the ethernet port on the xbox 360 is bad. I unhooked the ethernet cable, but it made no difference. I called Microsoft, knowing that I would have to pay to get it fixed. The customer service rep had me go through a couple of steps, nothing fixed it, so she informed me that I would have to send in my XBox to have it fixed for $120. Say what? $120? I thanked her and told her I would think about it. I then turned down the heat on my potatoes, turned off the boiling water, and went to Best Buy.
Last month, Microsoft announced the XBox 360 slim model, which replaced the original, effective immediately, and had the effect of causing retailers to knock $50 off the price of the system. I went to Best Buy and bought an Arcade unit for $150. No tax on Oregon purchases. So instead of paying $120 that I may have had to pay tax on, and wait 2-3 weeks to get my Xbox back repaired, I just bought a new one and connected my old hard drive to it. The new one comes with a wireless controller (bringing me up to 3 now) and 2 games: Banjo Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and Viva Pinata, neither game I have ever owned.
The new Xbox has the newest motherboard style: The Jasper, which is supposed to have the fewest instances of red rings (though my problem wasn't a red ring so who cares?) One nice surprise was the power brick on the new one is noticably smaller than the obese original.
Best Buy didn't have any slim Arcades for me to consider. I'm not sure if I'd pay $50 more for the slim. On the plus side it has a built in wireless adapter and it has a direct port for Natal, which even though at this time I have no plans to get, never say never. On the other hand, it's $50, I don't really want to play my games via wireless adapter if I can avoid i t, and it's way too soon to know what new hardware problems this first run of slim consoles will have. I have some time to think about it, 30 days to return the new system, but at the moment I am happy with the Arcade unit.
It's kind of a sad moment, we've been through a lot together. It died 2 days after I finished Bionic Commando, making it the last game I played, and one day after I watched Scrubs season 4 on DVD, making it the last DVD I watched. I won't be able to access my downloaded content unless I'm online with the new system, but that shouldn't be a problem.
So it's only newer systems that make you be online to access DLC? I find that really obnoxious. I paid for Portal and Monkey Island and Broken Steel, so I should get to play them whenever I want as long as my console is still functioning, internet or no internet. So even though I purchased these games, there will come a day when I just outright won't be able to play them anymore. And people are actually looking forward to this "digital future"? I don't get it.
ReplyDeleteAny system that you didn't originally purchase the content on, you have to be online to access. You can re-download it for free (at least until Microsoft discontinues that service). It doesn't matter if it's a newer system or an original. The software companies want us to buy licenses, not actual games so we can't resell them. They hate the used games market and this is an attempt to circumvent it.
ReplyDeleteAh, so games I bought on my original 360 won't work offline with my current 360 unless I actually re-download them? Because I've had instances where my internet was down, and some of my downloaded games only let me play the demo of them and that's it.
ReplyDeleteEven if you re-download them, you have to be online when you play them or you only get to access the demo. I'm glad the 360 is getting a longer life than the original, but eventually the time will come when we won't be able to redownload these titles.
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