The Xbox and I, revisited
Long time readers may remember my brief excursion into the world of the Xbox back in 2004, when I bought a limited edition Crystal Xbox in order to sell at a profit only to discover that they had been re-issued and I was lucky to get my money back at all. Back then, the Xbox platform held no interest for me, with its library appearing to consist almost entirely of shooting and driving games, and the online aspect didn’t hold any appeal either. Fast forward to the present day, and we find me adding an Xbox 360 Elite to my ever-changing collection of consoles.
I’d resisted buying an Xbox 360 for a long time; hardware issues never seemed to be out of the news, with consoles erupting into terrible flaming death as soon as they were taken out of the box. Gaming forums were awash with advice on how best to care for your Xbox 360 as if it was a frail, demented, urine-soaked relative – keep it in a well-ventilated area; consider suspending the power supply over an empty cardboard box so that one side of it wasn’t smouldering in the deep shag; make sure the console was kept upright/horizontal at all times (opinions on that one tended to go both ways); in the event of the Red Rings of Death, try wrapping the console entirely in towels and leave it on for a while; check the wattage of the PSU as that could reveal hints about which chipset the console was using; try and get hold of one with the quieter BenQ DVD drive…it went on, and on, and on, and I thought “This is bullshit.”
Why were people so tolerant of this? You’d read about people on their fourth or fifth Xbox and wonder what on earth they were doing to the damn things, and why they didn’t think it was an issue. People would take decibel readings of the fans and disk drives and they’d take temperature readings and publish them online for comparison like this was a normal thing to do with your console.
That said, things have been much quieter on the hardware failure front since Microsoft woke up and threw money at the problem. An opportunity arose to pick up the ‘Elite’ model for £150, I was going through a bit of a gaming drought at the time, and the Xbox library had diversified enough to attract the likes of me so I took the plunge.
If I hadn’t known of the hardware issues beforehand, I probably could have guessed. Really, the whole thing feels like it’s going to fall apart every time I touch it. It sweats cheapness from every pore, from the under-sensitive touch-sensitive power switch that needs me to push the console back a few millimetres each time I use it to the DVD drive that rattles nervously out of its holding like it’s been taken out of a seven-year-old PC; from the power supply that’s bigger than the Wii to the conspicuous absence of any built in WiFi.
I thought the machine was loud, but no louder than, say, my Dreamcast, until I actually bought a physical disk to put in it and then the thing sounded like a fucking hovercraft; fortunately you can now install games to the hard drive so its no longer an issue but I don’t know how I’d have coped beforehand – put the console in another room, maybe, and hope that the wireless controllers would stretch that far? I suddenly understood why people were posting decibel readings; as soon as the disc spun up I wanted to invite friends over to marvel at the thing like it was John Merrick; step up, step up, ladies and gentlemen, step right up! Be amazed, be dazed, be tearful and be fearful of the CONSOLE THAT SOUNDS LIKE AN ELEPHANT!
I am not an elephant! I am not an animal! I am a human being! I am a man!
Still. In its short time in my flat it’s settled in quite happily, and has already gained more use than the PS2 that I owned for seven months and never really liked. So far I’ve played, completed and generally enjoyed the unfairly-maligned Mirror’s Edge, I’ve blitzed through Beautiful Katamari and concluded that I may as well have just stuck with the free demo, I’ve whizzed through Portal and, whilst I loved the script and the concept and the voice work, felt that it was far too easy, and am currently working my way through Half-Life 2, a game that holds a special place in my heart due to fond memories of the original Half-Life, a game which I played during my first year at university and which demonstrated to me that you could have a cinematic, story-driven experience in a first-person shooter even though to progress through it meant killing everything you saw right in the face. There’s a whole host of downloadable games and extra content I plan to get just as soon as this ‘recession’ thing has passed by and we can all get back to being mindless consumers once again.
I also need to get Fable 2. This is something that needs to happen.
Obviously I’m not using the console like a typical Xbox owner would. I allowed my Xbox Live Gold membership to lapse to Silver as soon as my free trial had ended. I’ve yet to play any game online and the headset that came with the console remains in its plastic wrap. I have still never played a Halo game. I have turned off the ‘Achievement Unlocked!’ notification messages that kept interrupting me. I’m only going to be online at all due to spotting a wireless adaptor for £35 on Amazon this weekend; I wasn’t going to pay the RRP of £60 for one, nor was I going to lay down several hundredweight of ethernet cable across my flat as if I was trying to telegraph someone in New York.
The console doesn’t fit at all with my minimalist aesthetic but it does, at least, have enough games of interest to me to justify its purchase. But I do worry, every time I turn it on, that this time will be the time it chooses to explode in my face. Still, at least it would be something else to write about.
Also, the lurid, translucent green of the DVD cases the games come in is really, really horrible.
Mine intermittently makes horrible keening noises that I swear are coming from the actual chips themselves as they’re put through the wringer by moments of particularly fine graphical splendour. Recently I’ve tried to limit the strain put on the poor thing by looking at the floor as much as possible during first-person gameplay, but my similarly brief period of ownership has not been without heart-stopping moments of hardware-based terror…
The other day, it refused to turn off properly – the green light kept coming back on and then flicking off again, for no apparant reason. I’d practically pulled all the fuses out of the mainboard under the stairs before I realised it might have something to do with the wireless keyboard I’d plugged into the flipping thing.
A fantastic, and common post about Xbox’s. I used to have an xbox360 and spent 90% of my time playing guitar hero as it was the only thing to drown out its whurring noises!!! A good console if you have ear defenders, or no neighbours!!
The hardware horrors do make for some amusing reading. Between one set of revisions they added glue to the hotter-than-the-surface-of-the-sun graphics and cpu chips in a bid to keep them seated in their sockets (them slipping off their bearings being the prime cause of the RRoD – hence the towel trick works by heating up the box so much that the solder melts a bit again and, fingers-crossed, allows them to reseat themselves). And the first batches of ‘repairs’ came back with giant heat sinks added to the cpu but not to the gpu (which actually runs much hotter dontcha know), so they promptly failed again.
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As an added bonus, installing them makes most games load a bit faster, and ditto for their saved games. The Orange Box is a fucking trial without the install, frankly. Halo 3 doesn’t like Mr Install though. According to the makers, it was so well optimized for streaming from the disk that it runs a lot slower from the hdd thanks to all its caching of… textures, probably?
You have the ‘elite’ at least, which comes with the handy-for-this-feature 120gb hdd… It’s no fun at all juggling installations on a 20gb-er.
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Portal’s supposed to be easy, no? An exercise in story-telling and new gameplay mechanics. Almost a proof of concept rather than a whole game – hence its packaging with the Orange Box… And to be fair, the ‘extreme’ (or whatever it’s called) versions of the chamber maps are really, really ‘thinky’ in places. Not to mention the teeth-grindingly frustrating ‘challenges’ – particularly love the fewest portals one.
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Fable 2′s absolutely excellent fun. It’s very much a Molyneux game though. Wonderful, wonderful ideas, largely well executed, with gapping holes of logic, created by the usual epic overambition. Very entertaining, if easy, combat. Also the hats are great.
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The green light, Frank, might go away once it’s connected to the internet. This is basically a version of windows that the 360′s running on so it’s a lot happier with the regular updates they put out installed. If it is already though, connected to the internet that is, you’re probably approaching red-ring-of-death time. I have two and the second one’s away for repair at the moment. The first one had its excursion to Frankfurt last year.