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- My Visit From the Angel of Red Death
- Posted 4 months, 2 weeks ago by Sean
As much as I tried to deny it, I knew it was coming. All the warning signs were there, and yet I refused to believe. Deep down inside I had hoped that the 1 in 3 failure rate somehow wouldn't apply to me. I was like a teenager who just got his driver's license- I felt invincible; nothing could harm my 360. It was going to live forever.
But this week, my system started to give me some really ominous signs.
On Wednesday morning, I decided to get some time in on Geometry Wars 2 to see if I could surpass Coop's score of 100 million. This has become something of an obsession for me, and over the past two weeks, there have been several three to four hour sessions of Pacifism. After a few rounds of failure (if you can call 17 million a failure) my screen froze and my television gave off a terrible buzzing-humming sound. I promptly turned off the system (by hand, since it was no longer responding to the controller) and switched it back on again. One more time, I got about six games into my war, and BAM, frozen screen, sound of the emergency broadcast system. But this was no test.
I switched off the system and went on my merry way to work. Coming home that night, I was able to get a few games in before bedtime without any freezing issues. But then Thursday morning became a repeat of Wednesday, with three freezes in a row.
I was starting to worry. I started telling co-workers that the end was nigh. Those who have been there before nodded knowingly; those who have been lucky enough to have working systems acted like they sympathized, but I knew that deep down inside, they too felt invincible.
So last night I switched it on, knowing full well that our time together would be short-lived. This time around, the system crash occurred before Geometry Wars had even fully loaded. After another manual restart the screen froze on the "XBOX 360" page. So I switched off again, and crossed my fingers. I switched it on again.
Three red lights, general hardware failure. The Red Ring of Death.
So now I get to call MS and have them send me a coffin for my deceased (soon to be zombified) next-gen system. We had a year and half together, and that's more than a lot of couples can say.
But now for the bitching. First of all, you mean to tell me that my fucking system failed because of Geometry Wars?! I mean, I understand that most RRoD's are caused by overheating, but I have a hard time understanding how an XBLA game running off the hard drive can cause an overheat situation.
Which leads me to a question: for those of you who have been visited by the Angel of Death- what games killed your system? They say that sharing grief is a big step on the road to recovery. So come friends, you're in a safe place. It's sharing time.
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Review- Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 - XBLA
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Comments
That's what they invented the PS3 for!
you all should get a piece of hardware that is actually made by someone who knows what they are doing.
one thing that interests me, is how many people with RRoD are playing on HD-TVs, compare to the ones who don't... (wondering if this could be a factor, since HD TV requires a higher resolution, which push the GPU harder)
Mine died on the dashboard...esplain that!
I'm on my 4th system right now. I eventually got a direct number to Debrah at Xbox, because of the stink that I made, who took care of me and I haven't had a problem since. I was basically without a system from a week before Bioshock came out until just before Christmas in 2007. Lots of free useless stuff came out of it.
That sucks. I played way too much GH: III when I got it. I think that may have caused some sort of rift for my system. No issues whatsoever until I bought and played that game. Now GH (all versions owned in the house) are on my brother-in-law's XBox and mine is so clean away from it I hope it never happens again.
I heard the PS3 is in development for their own RROD to try and compete with Microsoft's success. Just a rumor......