Earlier this week I experienced something that, up until now, I thought only other people had to go through.
Xbox hardware failure.
I plugged it in, and instead of the familiar sights and sounds of console startup, I got a loud pop and a puff of smoke.
Is it the Red Ring of Death, people ask? Am I going to get a new unit under Microsoft's new three year warranty?
Nope, I say. Because I'm not talking about my Xbox 360. It still works fine.
I'm talking about my original launch Xbox, which gave me nearly six years of mostly faithful service, from December of 2001 until now. Sure, the past three years or so there were periodic disk errors. Sometimes it refused to "recognize" a game disc in the tray. When it was Halo or Halo 2, it was comical; how could the console not recognize those?
Other games I was forced to give up on because of disc errors. I could barely get through the first few hours of KOTOR. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance was the first game disc to give me problems, so much so that I replaced it with a cheaper Platinum Hits edition of it before I knew it was the drive, and not the disc, with the problem. Black I gave up on somewhere in the asylum level, although I finished the game off on the 360 the other day. My only comment is: why would anyone steal Halo 2's ending like that?
Halo and Halo 2 hardly ever caused a problem. Sometimes the Xbox wouldn't start loading those games, but once they did, I never got a disc error message in-game as I did with the others. Sure, loading levels would take a lot longer, and sometimes Halo's little ring-highlight loading animation would actually run backwards, but the game never gave up. It always loaded eventually, and always played.
Of course, the console was bought as a Halo Adapter, so it had better load those games. I had no interest whatsoever in console gaming between about 1985 and 2000. I hopped from the Atari 2600 over to a Commodore 64, then to an Amiga, and on to Macintosh computers. Games became a distant third to productivity and networking capabilities as I switched from desktops to laptops; about the only games I bothered to purchase religiously were from Bungie.
So the Xbox was bought just for Halo. Of course, I still ended up buying more than thirty other games. About half of them work on the 360, and half of them don't. Halo 1 and 2, Stubbs, KOTOR, Black, Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 all work.
Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance (the original, not the sequel) as well as Beyond Good & Evil, a bunch of old sports games, some ill-advised LOTR licensed games, and Advent Rising won't play (not that I was going to finish that last one anyway).
I haven't bought a PC or Macintosh game in years. Even my "Halo Adapter" unintentionally provided more gaming possibilities than I had time for. I hadn't meant for that to happen. I'd been entirely willing to support Bungie by purchasing an Xbox and a copy of Halo, but "stick it to the man" by buying nothing else; not bothering to wonder what would happen to Bungie and the Halo franchise if the Xbox had truly tanked.
Earlier this year, in anticipation of the Halo 3 Public Beta, I bought a 360, and it could hardly be more different than Xbox if it tried. It's slick, easy and fun to use and friendly. Being able to download demos as well as purchase Arcade games with a few button presses and then glory in high definition gaming from the comfort of a couch is a marvel.
Maybe it's just that I'm getting old, or that I became more of a Bungie fan than a gamer, but I can't see going back. I bought a MacBook after Apple switched to Intel processors at least in part so I could install Windows on it and take a look at all the games I was missing. More than a year later, I still haven't bothered to play a single Windows game, and I've removed the Windows partition to reclaim disk space. I may have bought the Xbox just for Halo, and would have bought the 360 if there was nothing else for it but Halo 3, but in the meantime there are more 360 games piling up to play.
In fact, if I just replaced the Xbox's power supply for about $30, I could play some of those other games that aren't backwards compatible yet, as well as have a second machine for Halo 1 or Halo 2 system link play. A bit more for a new DVD drive and it'd be just like new.
Not bad for a six-year-old Halo Adapter.
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