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I was a fan of the original Iron Chef show from Japan, and watched Iron Chef America for a time. It's a respectful enough sequel to the original, unlike that fiasco with William Shatner. Anyway, I guess I should have expected this. A videogame based on Iron Chef. But I wonder how the heck it is going to play out. A videogame based on a cooking show sounds really quite weird. It probably won't have any long standing power on the Wii, but I have to admit to a curiosity about the title. Might pick it up later when it gets discounted. :) Will have to wait on reviews of the thing. They have captured several of the Iron Chefs in the game, including Masaharu Morimoto, from the original Japanese show. I have to admit to a curiosity about this title. Too bad there aren't demos on the Wii like there are on the Xbox 360.

As the two or three of you who regularly read this blog might remember, back in February of 2007, I had a problem where my original Xbox 360 died. My original Xbox 360 was bought on January 1, 2006, and lasted until February 3, 2007. At that time, I had been just out of warranty, so when it died, I was going to have to pay $129 (plus tax and shipping) to repair the thing. I've been through this story already, if you read the link above, you can check out my original nightmare.

So, OK - fast forward to today. It's March 8, 2008. My second Xbox 360 has been going fine, although I've noticed as of the last week or so that when I turn it off, it was making an odd grinding sound. Nothing that really caused panic, but it was a sound that wasn't there before. So today I'm playing some MLB 2k8. Having fun, and then the wife and daughter went out for awhile. I got on the net for a bit, and came back to play some more. And guess what I saw? Well, given the blog entry's title, it can't be too hard to guess. In fact, I took a picture of it. It's shown to the right. This isn't a red ring picture glommed off the net, I just took this myself.

I have all the major consoles from "this generation". I have an Xbox 360, a Nintendo Wii, and a Sony Playstation 3. Of the three, I've had the 360 the longest (although not obviously the same actual unit). It's got the most polished interface, the biggest library, and a host of other things Microsoft will tell you about their console. It also has a horrendously godawful hardware failure rate due to what a lot of folks are suspecting is an overall design failure. For the longest time we didn't hear much about it, but not too long ago, there was a story saying that the overall failure rate for the console is 16.5%! Good Lord, that's insane. Most hardware failure rates are a couple of percent. You kind of expect that. It's inevitable. Things break. I get it. But 16/17 percent of all units? No wonder Microsoft had to extend the warranty.

That's the rub with me and my original Xbox 360 unit. That one was manufactured at some point pre-launch of the console in the fall of 2005. I forget the manufacture date of my original unit. This second unit was manufactured in August of 2006. That was right around the time that Microsoft started coming up with some ways to properly combat the problems the units were having, but I didn't get an upgraded unit for the second one. It was one from the original hardware design, before they started upgrading things to deal with the original design problems. In July of 2007, they extended the warranty for all units to three years with the red rings problem, and refunded repair money to those who had paid it. My first one died in the window between the original one year warranty, and when they extended it to three years. So I could have gotten away with it, but I was so mad at the time.. oh well.

Anyway, this new unit has died now too. At first I tried all the junk they have you try when they die (which I've read about enough, and went through once before with my first unit). Unplug the box AND the power supply from the wall. Let them power cycle (the light on the power brick goes out). Plug back in. It actually worked again. However, I knew it was likely temporary, so I turned off the box, and tried again. Three red rings. It's a gonner.

So I first tried the repair stuff on xbox.com - and got an error about my box being not registered, and then when I tried, I got another error on their website. Great. I was really hoping to avoid talking to someone on the line again, as it's generally guys who sound like English is their third language. So it was with some trepidation that I called 1-800-MYXBOX. I got another guy who sounded like I was talking with someone in India again. But this guy wasn't uber hyper, and was talking in a register I could understand. Without going through all of our phone call, I got a repair order put in.

Technically my box is out of warranty, but the three year repair thing covers this, so I don't have to pay anything. As has been documented elsewhere what happens now is that you get an empty box from Microsoft with UPS postage paid on it. You put your 360 console in there, and ship it off. A few weeks after that, you get it back repaired. I've read online that in a lot of cases it's not the same unit. I am hoping that due to the manufacture age of this unit, they don't just repair it, they replace it with one of the newer ones. The newer ones have quieter DVD drives, additional heat sinks, chips that use less power, and generate less heat. That kind of stuff. Hopefully that's what I get.

So now I wait - the empty box should arrive around Wed or Thursday this week or so they said. I now have to wait about three weeks or so to get an Xbox 360 back. I guess this means more time with my Nintendo Wii and my Playstation 3. Despite all the tech problems the 360 has (one of which is the extremely LOUD DVD drive the thing has - the Wii & PS3 are whisper quiet), I enjoy it more than the Wii & the PS3. That's not to say I don't enjoy games on the others - or I wouldn't have them. But the overall experience I think is the best on the 360. When it works.

When my wife suggested that I just buy a new one after my first failure, she did say that if the second one died, that she'd probably put her foot down and say I wasn't going to buy another one. This all has happened while she's out of the house with our daughter at one of my daughter's friends' birthday parties. I can't wait to see the rolling of the eyes (rightfully so) when she returns. :) At least this repair is free. What they tell you is that the repair work is not covered by the rest of the three year warranty, although if this happens a third time, I might be too mad to want another one.

The real tease of all this is that I have a development kit Xbox 360 on my desk at work. Those are nice, but the development kit boxes don't play retail games. Only development stuff. Darnit, otherwise I'd use that to play my games on. Sigh.

So in closing, I have this to say about my second Red ring of Death Xbox 360...

Saturday is the day my wife works, and Daddy gets to take care of Samantha. As that's gone on awhile now, I've gotten better at it, and I find true enjoyment at spending time with my daughter, and watching her grow up right in front of me. Still, I do enjoy nap time. :) So today I made myself some lunch and sat down to play a couple of hands of Uno on Xbox Live before I had to get to some chores, and what do I see? The Red Ring of Death on the front of my Xbox 360. Ugh.

Everything I've read about this says that it's bad. If you see it, forget it, your system is dead. So I hop on Google, do a search for that, and find a decent article on TeamXbox.com about the ring of death. They offered a few suggestions, as some of the flashing light "codes" indicate something stupid, like loose wires. None of that worked, so I rather dejectedly called Xbox support. After wading through a really dumb computer front end (that tried to act like a person), I finally got a customer service agent. I think I liked the dumb computer voice first.

I knew I was in trouble right away, as I started the phone call with "Red Ring of Death time", to which I got the response of "Excuse me? What is that?" Like an Xbox Customer Service rep has never heard that term before. This is not going to be good at all. It was obvious Mr. Agent was reading off a script. Now that I can deal with, even if I don't like it when I get it. But to make matters worse, this guy was acting like he was the host of a local morning talk show. You know the kind, all hyped up on java. Anyway, anytime anything even remotely negative came out of his mouth, he'd follow it up with - DON'T WORRY! Excuse me? What kind of nonsense is this? I work at a games company, I bet you I'd probably spent more time playing my 360 than he did. It was seriously annoying, but given I needed my 360 fixed, I stuck with it for awhile. To make matters worse, this guy had a very thick foreign accent, and spoke way too fast. It was difficult to understand him in the first place. Then he gave me some twaddle about my address on file being in India. Nevermind he had the street address, city, and zip code right. The state said India for some reason. Oh boy - my mind was instantly transported to this cartoon about tech support people which makes me laugh every time.

The guy eventually said that I qualified for a warranty repair (which he later said was an out of warranty repair), and told me it would cost $129 to repair my 360. BUT DON'T WORRY - We'll pay for the shipping. You cheap bastards, you should pay for the repair too! I had a 2005 model 360, one of the first made (the manufacture date on the back said Sep 2005). So I had just about enough of his happy "Don't Worry" crap, and said "Excuse me? $129 to repair this? I was told that you guys were fixing all 2005 model 360's for free - what's this $129 charge"? I deviated from script, so I think he didn't quite know how to respond - I didn't swear at him, but I was obviously sounding agitated. He repeated the line, said something about offering me a case number, which at this point I was seriously mad, and probably wasn't properly listening to him. I got one more "Don't worry", and down went the receiver. Jackass. I don't want to hear this "Don't worry" garbage. I almost said "Would you stop sayign that, and just talk to me?" I didn't, it probably wouldn't have helped anything anyway. I mostly hung up because I couldn't take it anymore, but I also decided I should get off the line before I said something which would cause him to hang up on me, and probably enter it into my records as "pain in the ass customer".

The kicker is that my warranty expired just about 30 days ago. Lovely. Additionally, the repair center is in Texas, so I would have been charged sales tax on that $129 repair fee.

So I cooled off for awhile, and when Lynn came home from work we talked about it a bit. Told her all of what happened above, and she actually brought up the concept of getting a totally new one, when I said that the one I'd get back would be a refurbished model. I hate refurbs, you never know what problem is hidden underneath there. Yeah, they "fixed it", but something happened to that unit to cause it to need to be refurbished. Never like that, feels like I'm buying a used car. I originally bought a Core system 360, because I was impatient, and didn't want to wait until I could find a full system. I got mine on January 1, 2006, and full 360 systems were hard to find then. So I have all the extra stuff (hard drive, headphone, wireless controller, remote, etc) that you would need to upgrade a core system into a full system already. We figure that the difference between "repairing" my current 360, and getting a used/refurb model is about $150. That $150 would buy me a new unit, with a more recent manufacture date (one would expect, given the supply problems 13 months ago), as well as a new full warranty, and some piece of mind. Yeah, I probably could save a few bucks, but we talked about it, and decided this is the way to go.

So tonight I ordered a new Xbox 360 Core system, it'll get here Wedneday, ordered from Amazon.com, and as I belong to their Prime program, I get free two day shipping. No tax either, which is nice. But I'm a) annoyed that I have to even go through this at all, and b) for the doofus I got on the customer support line. Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh!

The only real positive to this is that the original system which is now a brick was one I never paid for in the first place - it was a Christmas present from my company back in Christmas 2005. So I'm not "double paying". I might have to look into an extended warranty, need to see how much Microsoft charges for that. Oh, and I know the 360 Hard Drive is still working, so I won't lose all my save games and downloads and things like that. That is good.

UPDATE Mon Feb 5: I was seriously contemplating recreating the copier scene from Office Space with my dead 360 unit. When I mentioned that to a co-worker up here at my office, I was told to go look at Ebay, so I looked there for broken Xbox 360, and wow! Found out people are getting in the neighborhood of $100 for dead, non functional 360 units. That rather stunned me, and I decided to go that route, so tonight when I get home from work, I will list my dead 360 on Ebay, and use that money against the credit card bill for buying a new 360 core. That makes this a little more palatable. I'm still not happy about all this, but given the money for the repair is a wash, and then add this $100 to the mix, and then I'm probably paying in the neighborhood of $60 to receive a totally new unit, as opposed to a refurbished one.

Ran across a cool link over the holidays. It's a nice story by PC World magazine on their website. It tells the story of video game consoles. That much is not new - it's been done a bunch of times before. What is new (to me) is the inclusion of old TV commercials for the games over the years. That was a nice touch to add to the piece.

It covers from the old days of Pong, the Fairchild F, the Atari 2600, through NES, Sega Saturn, Neo Geo, and up to current with Xbox, Wii, etc.. If you're a fan of video games like I am, you should check this out, I think it will be time well worth spent.

Here's a couple of my favorite commercials from the series:

So far I have to say I'm enjoying my Xbox 360 a lot. Part of it is the rarity thing, since they're still not terribly easy to get, the fact that I have one alone is cool. But what's terribly fun to me is the interface of the system. It is always available no matter what you're doing with a single button press. There's a ton of information on your friends, what games they've played, etc... There's a messaing system (either text or voice) between players and friends. There's ways to watch videos from other computers on your lan (same goes for music & pictures). The interface is customizable with different skins, colors, & pictures. It's just sleek, slick, and to be honest, when I first started my 360 for the first time, I probably went about 3 or 4 hours before I put a single game in the thing. I'm one of these people who loves looking at every option available to me in a piece of software, and whether I use them or not normally, I love the exploration. The 360 interface sucked me in - it's very brilliantly designed.

It's very cool being able to bring up one of your friends, and look at their game list, and see what they've played. What else is cool is the sense of competition that the system brings with your friends. Every Xbox 360 game has accomplishments - goals if you will - that you can get in the game. Each accomplishment brings with it a point value. That point value is added to your global "Gamer Score". That score is kept across all games for your account. It's a very cool way of encouraging you to play games you probably wouldn't normally play as much of to get points. When you get a game with a scorekeeping function, it's also very cool to see a high score table of just your friends, as opposed to every single Xbox live player. I know my group of friends seems to be constantly trying to top each other in Hexic (which is a Bejwelled knockoff (but better, IMO) that comes with the 360 Hard Drive). In fact, games like Hexic are great, because they're small, and you can find yourself lost in them, eihter just playing, or trying to top your friends' scores.

Another thing is this "HD Era" Microsoft keeps talking about. I don't have HD yet. Even with prices dropping, it's not something I have that kind of extra money for. I have a baby. :) But I will eventually. But don't let them fool you. My Xbox 360 games look a lot better than Xbox 1 games. The quality of them even on my "regular old TV" is way better than what I was used to seeing.

If you can get one, get it. It's a lot of fun. I probably could write a novel about all the stuff on there, but that wasn't my intent - just a quick notice on how I love the Xbox 360 interface, and how the unified online solution (point system across all games - even the small ones like Hexic) is a brilliant device, and one that I hope serves Microsoft long into the future. Great idea.

Also, you can see my gamercard here on my blog. Go to the main page, and it's on the right hand column in the Xbox Live category. Over there you can see:

My Reputation: Ranking of myself based on online games played against others.
My GamerScore: See above.
The Zone: You can choose what level of play you want to play at
The last 5 games I've played icons
My Gamer Picture

As most people who are interested in videogames are doing right now, I went on a hunt for an Xbox 360 this afternoon. I didn't hit every store that could conceivably have one, but I hit all the major stores in my immediate area, especially after hearing the story on the net about the Best Buy "greeting" story. Well, as usual, I struck out. Quite honestly, I would have been stunned if I had found a 360 to buy.

So, with resign in my heart on another day without one, I called my wife and told her I was on my way home, and asked if there was anything we needed for me to pick up. She said no, but mentioned "What about CompUSA"? That was a great idea, because around Thanksgiving 2001, when Xbox 1 came out, I was able to find one at this same store. That is no guarantee of anything, but I figured it was worth a shot. I drove by the CompUSA near me (it's this store in Mesquite, TX near Town East Mall) on the way home, and stopped in. Came in the door, and walked over to the videogame section. On my way over, my heart leapt! I saw six Xbox 360 boxes sitting there underneath the demo unit on the endcap. I was all excited!

I got over there, thinking "YES! - I got a 360!". Picked up the box, and... uh-oh.. It was light. Too light. I then saw the crushing blow. "For Demonstration Only". It was an empty box. All six of them were. To no one in particular, I went "YOU BASTARDS!". That was one hell of a tease, putting six empty boxes on the floor (3 regular, 3 core) where people walking over there would think they were for sale. If I was working there, I'd want to set up a webcam to see people's reactions to picking up the boxes.

I spoke with someone working there, and she said that not only do I have to compete with all the other people in the store wanting them, but the store I was in handled internet orders from compusa.com, so my chances are next to nil getting an Xbox 360 at this store now. So not only was I 360 less today, I had the added fun of being royally teased by an electronics store, too!

So again, as I sign off this entry, I have this to say about CompUSA! YOU BASTARDS!!

The annual cash cow juggernaut that is EA's Madden NFL Football 2005 came out a couple of weeks ago. It's selling like wildfire.

However, in a blatant act of "Give us $50 each year for the latest iteration of the game", some stores are taking pre-orders for the Madden 2006 version already, which is listed with a ship date of August 8, 2005. Now, I know there's a version every year. I know sports games fans get bilked more than any other franchise around. But having pre-orders up already (at EB Games & Gamestop) when the current one is fresh? That seems a bit much to me.

I think we all knew that ESPN's NFL 2k5 game wasn't going to sell as much as Madden. It's like me coming up with my own operating system that's as good as Microsoft's. You can do it, but it won't sell as well. ESPN/Take 2 tried a cool move by making their current game only $20. It's a maneuver that worked on me. Because Madden's game was finally Xbox Live capable, I was going to move there, after the death of the Microsoft line of football games. However, ESPN came in, and it's hard to beat the $20 price point over the $50 one for Madden. Too bad more people couldn't see that, it's a great game.

But taking pre-orders for the next version of the game when the current one is fresh off the mint? Seems a bit greedy, guys.

I've been playing video games for a LONG LONG time. I've played a lot of bad ones in my time. I've played a lot of good ones. The one I want to talk about most definitely falls in the BAD category.

While I've not personally played the game, I ran across this review of Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing. This qualifies as one of the best reviews of a bad game I've ever read. You know it's great when the review actually says "Please do not play this game. We cannot stress this enough.". It's a great game review.

What's even funnier is the video review at the bottom of the page. It requires you to be a Gamespot subscriber to view, but it quite possibly is the funniest thing I've seen in awhile. It also has gameplay footage which is quite hysterical in and of itself. How someone could release such a steaming pile like this as a boxed video game is beyond me. And it's got the name Activision on it, too. It's incomprehensible how a game company could release this. It boggles the mind.

If you're feeling deranged or psychotic enough, there's a place to buy it. Here.

Over the weekend, my brother and I attended the Austin Gaming Expo which took place in Round Rock, Texas. Most of it was related to classic gaming, with a big emphasis on the Atari 2600, but there was more modern stuff there (in fact, there were two seperate Halo tournaments going on).

It was nice for me personally, since I don't get to see my brother much (as I live in Garland, TX and he in Norristown, PA). My brother flew to Dallas, and the two of us drove to Austin for the show. We didn't buy much, only 5 Atari 2600 games. That drives our collection (my brother's and mine) to something like 475 games. Our complete collection of Atari 2600 cartridges can be seen here.

Anyway, the show was great, although two things I felt were negative. First it was too small. Too many people showed up, and it quickly became a sea of humanity. Plus there wasn't enough trading for my tastes. There needed to be more traders/sellers. There was some of that, but not nearly enough. Speaking of that, if anyone reading this happens to have an extra copy of Red Asteroids for the Atari 2600 (That's the Red label PAL cart - Picture of it here - please let me know. I want one.

I'm looking forward to the 2004 show, it should be much better. Oh, and hi to John Romero who I bumped into in in the lobby after the show was over.

Update Aug 2006: The 2600 site I used to have which I reference in this site no longer exists, so I pulled out the (now broken) links.