Seriously. If Microsoft were a physical entity, I'm sure we'd get into a fight over something stupid - and I'd most likely lose. Why, you ask? Well, outside of the still problematic Xbox Live issues, my 360 decided today that it would rather kill itself than have to deal with another two minute delay while inviting a friend to a game. When you compound that with a recent inexplicable Vista crash on my laptop, it almost seems as if everything Microsoft has begun to revolt against me.

Live has been horrendously slow since the first week of the holiday break, and it's quite surprising to see that it hasn't been repaired after all of this time. Night after night, Call of Duty 4 continually insists that I need an internet connection to play multiplayer games. I don't want to jump the gun here, but I'm pretty sure that I have one. In between bouts of profanity, I'll finally get into a lobby, only to have it not start a game, or launch itself and crash shortly thereafter. The best part is, you're particularly screwed if you want to party up with a friend, as the lag between when you join a game and Live tells your buddy to do the same is so severe that he'll get dropped 95% of the time. Granted, these problems were intermittent, but they coincidently happened to occur virtually every time I wanted to play a game on Xbox Live in the past 3 weeks. A free arcade game is a nice bit of compensation, but I think a focus should be placed on fixing these nagging issues first. Three weeks is a long time for there to be terrible service with just about anything.

The poor thing simply couldn't handle the pressure anymore.

Somehow though, the online annoyances pale in comparison to my 360 suffering a painful red-ringed death. The culprit: Omega Five. Well not really, but for some reason the title screen of this game caused the machine to artifact and promptly lock-up. A reboot yielded the "general hardware failure" notification, and the console hasn't functioned properly since. You can tell the poor thing really wants to serve my gaming needs, but can't, given how it will sometimes start the boot-up process, only to freeze at the logo. Out of curiosity, I checked out the error code that the console gives you - it returned 0102. A quick Google search will reveal that this is actually Microsoft's way of saying "we have no idea what the f*** went wrong," which is awesome in and of itself. If I had to guess, I'd say that the machine was screwed from the start. Within the first few weeks of its use, it would infrequently lock up, until one day that just stopped. I should have taken that as an omen to return the thing and wait until they released the newer model a month later. That's right; my 360 is less than six months old.

I think the best (worst) part of this whole situation is that I'm now left with two horrible choices. I can either wait for Microsoft to receive, repair, and ship back my 360 (which apparently takes about 21 days) or burn another $400 on a new console. As someone who has to constantly review games, the 400 dollar option sucks, but almost seems necessary at this point, as I have deadlines to meet and reviews to write. I was actually playing through Omega Five for review purposes, and since I never finished the game, I can't properly finish the article.

So what was the point of this blog entry? I suppose it seemed like the right time to put all of the 360's current issues on the table and examine why many who use this console consider this acceptable. Three weeks of piss-poor online performance in a subscription service is a travesty. Hardware that dies after six months of casual use is downright reprehensible. And having to wait a month for repairs is the ultimate low blow. I can't believe Microsoft originally had the gall to charge people to get their consoles fixed. I'm getting it done for free and I feel like I should be compensated for the inconvenience alone. One thing is for sure though, you know it's real bad when you tell people that your 360 died and they respond with "you too?"