How in the world did Microsoft expect to take over the console world with something of such low production quality?
I bought an Xbox when Halo 2 came out. I played Halo 2, was hugely disppointed, and then I didn’t do anything with my box. I probably got maybe 30, 40 hours of play out of it including multiplayer, then it sat, perfectly level, boxed back up, for a couple months before I got a couple of other games. Cranked back up, it ran for maybe 30m before dying, and now on boot it tells me to go call customer service (two codes depending on its mood: 7, HD toast, 12, DVD toast). And of course it’s out of warranty now, since I bought it back in November. Wheeeeeeeeeeeee.
So that’s $150 + accessories for 40h of light use before it melted down. I guess storage in a room-temperature environment for those months when it didn’t have games I could play caused it to grow petulent. And now what am I going to do — spend another $150 on a box that’s pretty close to the end of its lifetime in order to play a couple of games? This is exactly the kind of pointless money-flushing I left PC gaming to get away from.
The only good part is that since my warranty had expired anyway, I cracked it open to check the cable connections (looked good, which in a way is unfortunate) and got to look around the innards. Didn’t make me feel any better about the money, though. And tomorrow, Jade Empire and Psychonauts arrive, and I have no console to play them on.
My Playstations have worked without complaint for years, my Dreamcast still cranks on to play Skies of Arcadia (awesome!). Or, to put this another way: my average console lifespan to Xbox lifespan ratio is easily 100:1. I’m sooooo not buying the next generation Xbox.
Hey Derek, just to provide a little counterpoint, last year my xbox started freezing a lot with games and dvd’s and or not loading them at all. I had purchased the xbox back in november 2k1 when the system first came out so I was pretty sure it wouldn’t be covered under the warranty but I thought I’d try anyways. So I called up microsoft customer service and gave them the serial number on the box and they said it was covered and they would pay for the shipping and would fix it. A week later I got my box back and its worked perfectly since. This obviously doesn’t mean your experience was the minority, but I just thought I’d throw a little love microsoft’s way since they were so helpful with my box.
Dude, that’s pretty sweet. I’ve heard those early, early versions were even worse, which is hard to believe.
And then other people told me their PlayStation horror stories, which actually made me feel a lot better.
Yeah there was also the power cord recall a few months back, but since it was only like a 100 or so that caught on fire, I figured I’d risk it and hope I’m not roasting marshmallows on my xbox anytime soon.