Shame On You Bill

So remember way back when, in my first blog post, I mentioned that my XBox crapped out on me. Lets talk about that. How is it, that a major company, one of the biggest and most successful in the world, manufactures and sells a 100% defective product. Now I know this has been blogged about ad nauseum but, now its happened to me twice, and I'm pissed. 

And this is more than the infamous Red Ring of Death. The first time my lifeblood was taken from me, something in the hardware fucked up and after about 20 min. of game play, the screen would just go blank. So I called my boy and he said, "oh yeah, its one of the capacitors, it happened to me too". The second, and most recent time, I got one red flashing light on the red ring of death and a stupid error message so I Googled: Error Message E 74 and got 2,570,000 hits. All of these things break! All of them. I don't know anyone who is not at least on their second 360. I know one guy who is on his 5th in two years. 

Now Microsoft does admit that they continue to manufacture and sell defective machines so they extended all warranties to three years after the manufacture date of the console. Whoo fucking Hoo... So that means that when my  $300 video game system, craps out while I'm in the middle of a marathon session of a $60 game (Fallout 3 is amazing, really); all I have to do is pack it up, send it UPS (don't even fucking get me started on those morons), and hopefully, in about 4 weeks! I will have my 360 back. In case you don't know, 4 weeks is a life time to a gamer. I could play 50+ hours in that time, and I don't play as much as some. Not to mention that my 360 was also my DVD player and I just signed up for Netflix and was really enjoying streaming movies through it. 

Damn you Microsoft, this shit is inexcusable. But there is nothing we can do, for now. Right now, you have better games and a far superior online service. But in the next generation of consoles, this disregard for your faithful, money spending consumers could cost you. Maybe Sony's next gen system will be just as good is yours (the current one is actually a much more powerful machine) and maybe they will have matured on the content front. If so, I can't image too many people lining up to take this ride again.