Let Us Tell Sad Stories of the Death of Consoles

Yesterday I got up early to pack my 360 and all my Rock Band kit into a suitcase to drag it down Holloway Road, ride with it through the Tube, then drag it into my office so we could do our first planned office morale activity: play some Rock Band. That's doubly-cool because Rock Band isn't out here yet, so no one has had a chance to play around with it. I set up the Xbox, plugged it in, got all the instruments plugged in, ran through a test song to make sure everything was working correctly, turned it off until the session was about to start, came back and turned it on, watched as the menu froze, then watched as the startup screen froze, and then got the symbol you see above.

The Red Ring of Death.

The Red Ring of Death, or RROD, is what happens when there's a critical failure inside a 360 - it flashes three quarter-circles of red light to indicate that it's got a bit of a problem. It also means your console isn't working anymore and you have to send it to Microsoft so they fix it - and wait, console-less, for them to do so.

Now it's no mystery that I worked on the 360 account in my first days at Edelman, initially on the Corporate team and then on the Community team, before moving on to other accounts (and, that takes care of my transparency disclosure too.) I was excited to work on the 360 account because I came from traditional games, I thought the 360 was doing a lot of things right, and I liked the original Xbox a lot. I don't want to say that I was chugging the cool-aid, but I did buy the first 360 I could as soon as I could.

That one lasted about three months before its DVD drive failed, scratching some of my discs.

The next one lasted about six months or so before its DVD failed.

The one you see above is my third Xbox 360.

Additionally, I packed it into a box to ship over here around the first of November, so until recently I had been Xbox-less. It took far longer to get here than anticipated, so it was sitting unused in its box for a good part of the last few months. Since it got here, I haven't put it through any use it hadn't been through before - often I'm very good about turning it off and not playing for too long at any given time - not that I have time to do otherwise.

Now I've had a lot of consoles. I had an NES. It did start to get wonky, because some NES' had problems with their connectors going bad. Fixing it is an easy open-screw job. I have a Genesis. It still works fine. I had a SNES. Going strong. I have a Dreamcast that works like a charm. I have purchased a 2600, an Intellivision, a Colecovision, a Sega CD and Sega 32X, a Jaguar, a Turbo Graphix 16, a Saturn, and and Xbox, all of which work as well as they did when they rolled off the assembly line. I also have a PS2, which I had to replace twice, both times for the DVD drive failing. If I had purchased a piece of consumer electronics that failed three times on me, I would simply not buy it again or replace it after the third time.

Except in this instance I have hundreds of dollars of games for this device, so I'd really be screwing myself. So I will wait, patiently, for my the repaired console to come back.

I offer no judgment on this situation - I leave that up to you, Puppeteers. I'm only neutrally reporting what's happened to me and the fact that I will now likely have to wait two more months to get my console back. I also have to request my specific console back, because it's a US 360 and 360 games are region-coded - meaning if I just went out and got a UK 360, none of my games would work on it. And since I have to send it to the UK repair center (centre), I run the risk of them not returning my console to me at all but instead giving me one that won't work with my games.

In the meantime, as much as I'd love to play Rock Band or Crackdown with my friends back home - sorry guys, I'm going to have to sit the next few rounds out. I suppose you could send game requests to the repair center (centre) - I hear they have a lot of consoles there.

A Lot Can Happen in Three Months

On December 1, I packed up a few boxes of my stuff in Seattle to ship it to London. It's now February 19 and I'm going to have to wait at least another week before I see my stuff, making it a good three month lapse. You can read the whole story on my other blog, thanks to the lovely company VIP Relocation, who the Beautiful Competition and I now simply refer to as "those jokes."

One of the things I packed into those boxes was my good old Xbox 360, and one of the other things was an accompanying attachment I purchased as a tax break back when I was working on Microsoft business in Seattle: the HD-DVD Player accessory. In early December Heroes had just come out on HD-DVD (exclusively), things were looking really great for the format, and I was looking forward to getting some good life out of it once I unpacked it here (should it ever arrive.)

Even on January 1, that was a distinct possibility.

Then the following happened:

Warner Bros., one of the major backers of HD-DVD, switched to Blu-Ray exclusively. Blu-ray is the competing HD optical format.

HD-DVD canceled their CES press conference. Ouch.

Paramount defected to Blu-ray shortly thereafter.

Universal hedged its bets and went with Blu-ray too.

My former client announced a fire sale on HD-DVD accessories.

Netflix dropped HD DVD from its lineup, a sad move since aside from Heroes and a copy of Hot Fuzz I never bought one, just got them from Netflix.

So did Wal-Mart. Double-ouch.

Finally, Toshiba, the HD-DVD manufacturer, gave up and pulled the plug.

And to add insult to injury, Gamestop won't give you any money for your HD-DVD stuff anymore - even the Xbox accessory.

Now there's nothing left to do but to tell sad stories of the death of kings.

It's pretty amusing that this all went down while my HD-DVD accessory was locked away on a boat somewhere. This is always the price of early adoption, and I don't think I'll ever make this mistake again. But on the other hand, I liked HD-DVD's menus far better than the Blu-rays I saw, which were basically DVDs with better resolution. The HD-DVDs were just cleaner, they looked more techie. Which may be part of the reason most people didn't like them.

On the other hand, all I'm out is an accessory that cost me $150 for which I got a tax write-off anyway and I did get some serious enjoyment out of for the short span in which I had it. Who knows, maybe it will become a collector's item someday like a Sega CD or a 32x or any other failed add-on video game accessories in the past.

I guess when it finally does get here I can just put it in my collection of old video game crap that I'll use when I have a house again, someday, maybe.

The Ten Thousand

It's not going to last, so I have to commemorate my even 10,000 Gamerscore somehow:

A "Virtual" Minefield of Spoilers

I'm very excited about BioShock coming out next week. I downloaded the demo and played it through, and I'm planning on another playthrough in the next couple of days. Except for the demo being linear (which the final game is expected to address somewhat), I have no real complaints.

But after Toys 'R Us broke BioShock's streetdate, the Internet is now a minefield of spoilers. So much so that I'm taking every measure I can not to read anything about BioShock at all anymore.

Spoilers are a tricky thing. As my wife can attest, 99% of the time I spoil things myself. I look up a movie on IMDB so I know the twist (if I haven't guessed it already.) I read the last few pages of a book so I know how it ends. Most of the time, I don't really care.

But I realize I'm in the minority. There's people who spoil things maliciously, and I don't understand that. For example, before the Harry Potter book hit, I lost track of the number of posts on Something Awful designed to spoil the book. There's video of people walking into a bookstore and spoiling who died and didn't die to crowds of children. The "manliness" of what is essentially beating up a child notwithstanding, I don't get why people have to be killjoys about these kinds of things. Just because I know the ending doesn't mean I'm going to go ruin it for anyone else. It's tacky and it's selfish and it's probably a little sociopathic, not unlike hurting a defenseless creature or person.

At any rate, I enjoyed playing System Shock 2 a lot, and the "big reveal" about halfway through that game is easily one of my favorite moments in gaming, if not my top favorite. I expect BioShock to have similar reveals, and I don't want to fuck it up for myself by accidentally reading about it. In fact, if it happens with the lights off at 3 AM just like the reveal in System Shock 2 happened to me, all the better.

And for those of you who intentionally spoil things for people: you're a bunch of morons and to paraphrase Shepherd Book, there's a special place in hell for you along with child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

How To Design A Shitty Game [UPDATE 1]

1. Create a reward that is only possible for completing a level without dying.
2. Create a level based around vehicle combat.
3. Spend zero time implementing intuitive vehicle combat controls.
4. Make an unskippable three-minute cutscene before the level.
5. If the player dies and doesn't get the reward, force them to go all the way back to the menu before replaying the level - and of course watch the cutscene again.
6. Repeat three times.

[UPDATE 1]"I swear if I don't get it this time, I'm going to murder a hobo."

"Honey, it's just a game!"

"But it's just a hobo!"

Jack Thompson should never read this, ever. What have I become? Damn you Lucas for licensing your IP to shitty game designers! Damn you to HELL!

Jericho: SAVED

This is astounding.

Like many TV viewers with an Internet connection, I enjoy discussing my favorite shows online. I've subscribed to the Jericho thread (spoilers in first post) on Something Awful for a while now - which became a call to action after the show was canceled shortly after the season finale.

The show was supposedly canceled for poor ratings (even though CBS put it up against American Idol - a show more popular than the fucking Superbowl). But the story doesn't just begin and end with the canceling of a show.

CBS did some very intelligent things with Jericho. They offered users their own message board and wiki, right on the CBS site. Good, because it drives traffic to CBS' site (as opposed to an offsite forum like Something Awful), and good because it gives fans a place to rally. Jericho was a story arc show much like recent, successful dramas on network (Heroes) and cable (Deadwood, The Sopranos), which is to say that each episode built on the last. It also meant there was a fair amount of fans trying to figure out mysteries, whether it was the morse code message at the beginning of each episode to the mastermind behind the nuclear attacks in the show.

In short, it was a brilliant stoke of community development online.

So what happens when you've given people the tools to come together as a community around a show they care about, and then suddenly announce that show is canceled?

Fans get upset. They mobilize.

It's happened before, of course. Firefly fans managed to get Serenity made (which still ended up flopping), but CBS was firm: the show was done for and there was nothing that could be done.

Or could there? One guy, who owns a nut company in New Jersey, decided a tie-in to the "nuts!" phrase from the final episode would make an excellent rally point. So he designed a nuts campaign to save Jericho - where he would deliver nuts to CBS headquarters as a statement of support (the nuts would then be donated to charity, and proceeds from sales would go to helping rebuild the town of Greensboro, Kansas, recently devastated by a tornado - Jericho is located in Kansas.) How many nuts have been delivered to date? Almost 20 tons. The YouTube videos of the deliveries are pretty awesome. The campaign became an Internet phenomenon as well, making sites like Metafilter.

The show's actors and producers were surprised by the outpouring of support. So too was CBS; they wanted to find a way to resolve the storyline. Maybe a two-hour movie? Nothing doing. The show's writers refused.

And today, on the LA Times' TV blog, comes this post: Resurrection: The fans save Jericho. The most interesting part is producer Carol Barbee's comments about the inaccuracies of ratings and the shifting face of entertainment:

I really think that what has been learned here is that networks are going to have to look at numbers and who is watching their show and who is downloading their show in a different way from here on out. I think they have to understand that the Nielsens are not telling the story anymore and that the 18-49 demographic they're all so keen on is online and that's how increasingly they are getting their news and entertainment.

That's quite appropriate - since I myself watched the first 10 episodes on my Xbox 360, downloading them from the video marketplace.

It was the Internet that united fans of the show, and it was the online communities created around it that led to the passion, investment, the tools for communicating and mobilization, and the dedication not to give up that saved Jericho.

Whether a company is utilizing the online community to promote their brand or product, a group of dedicated citizens is using it to enact positive political change, or an as-yet undreamed-of use that is still years away - Jericho's being saved is a great example of the wonderful things that a dedicated community can enact when given the tools. Frankly, it makes me proud to be in the line of work I'm in.

Achievement Unlocked

Going through my animated gifs and came across this gem:

Zombie Grinder

In addition to picking up our dog today, I've also been grinding out one of the last achievements in Dead Rising. Dead Rising is an Xbox 360 zombie game, and quite possibly the best reason to purchase the system at the moment. It's a game that's wickedly flawed, but whose awesomeness actually makes up for the flaws and still puts it far ahead of a lot of other games out there at the moment.

Achievements are Xbox 360's way of permanently recording your accomplishments. They don't actually do anything (except earn you Gamerpoints, which are equally meaningless and are just a nearly-arbitrary number), but each Achievement has a title and a corresponding picture. Think of it as a combination of a Boy Scout Merit Badge sash with a bunch of badges on it, a permanent journal of your gaming accomplishments with time and date, and a scrapbook of the various things you've done in a single game or across lots of games.

They're also an excellent way to keep you playing a game beyond when you might have stopped, especially if you're an OCD freakshow like yours truly.

I've got 46 out of 50 of Dead Rising's achievements, and I'm grinding out two of the last four today. Unfortunately the last of those two means leaving the game running for 14 hours straight, without saving or pausing. If you pause, you're going to leave the game on longer. And you have to pay attention to it every 20 minutes or so, so you can feed your character.

Sound like a pain in the ass? Yeah, but no more so than grinding out levels for a WoW character, I suppose.

I started the console at 6:45 this morning, and now (11:30 at night) I'm about an hour or so away from finishing and going to bed. Yeah.

Hellboyalicious

It's probably going to suck (OK, it stands a very high chance of sucking) but I'll still buy the Xbox 360 Hellboy game, because someone's got to keep feeding him pamcakes. Judge for yourself - Joystiq has a trailer up.