So this all started this past sunday. On saturday I finally got around to playing the Halo 3 beta (through Crackdown), and played it for a few hours, then stopped for the night.
Sunday, I decided I wanted to play some crackdown, then probably some more Halo 3 beta. But when I turned on my 360 and it got to the dashboard, at the bottom of the screen where it’d normally have the game name, it now read “Unplayable disc”. No matter how many times I ejected and reinserted the disc it would not load the game. Frustrated I stuck in another game (Smackdown Vs Raw), and proceeded to play that for that day.
Fast Forward to monday after a day at work I was going to wind down with my 360 and decided to try Crackdown again to see if the system had seen the light yet, but no, it had not. So I filled out the webform for support on the Xbox website and proceeded to get the same canned response twice (the disc is dirty, the disc is damaged, try the disc in another system, blah blah frakking blah). So I decided to privately say F’ You to their innanely canned email system and try the 800 number.
After a fairly long wait (which at my work would mean fines for the business) I got ahold of someone who helped me to clean the 360′s cache to see if that would fix the problem (it didn’t), so they gave me a reference number. After all that I hung up un-helped with a broken xbox (from the launch no-less), I then decided to see if any of my other (roughly 30) games would work. None of them worked at all. So I tried the fracked up email system once more and got the same canned response again when I explicitly stated the fact that no disc whatsoever worked in the system, let me say that again in case you didn’t comprehend it the first time, NO DISC WORKED AT ALL, and they sent me the same message saying the one disc is damaged or dirty.
Apparently all the people Microsoft hired for tech support failed reading comprehension in school. I guess I’ll have to waste another 20-30 minutes on the phone with them tomorrow to hopefully get this resolved once and for all.
God I *love* Canned Responses
New Games
So I haven’t posted in a while, what with work and some new games I seem to have neglected to set aside anytime to post for all my voyeurs.
So I have yet to get a Wii, sadly, but recently got both Rainbow 6 Vegas and Smackdown Vs Raw 2007 for my 360. One’s freakin’ awesome, the other is good but has problems.
First the good. Rainbow 6 Vegas is a blast in both single and multiplayer. And everything you’ve heard (or maybe haven’t) about the graphics being insanely cool is true. It’s a very good looking game, and plays as good as it looks. Now I realize I’ve kinda said the same thing twice over now but it deserves to be said as such. Multiplayer is well thought out and implemented. While playing Co-Op over Xbox Live I didn’t really have any lag, but when I was trying to versus the game were usually around 10-14 people and they got really laggy, not so fun.
As far as Smackdown goes, they did a pretty good job with their first next-gen effort. But as with pretty much every game that they’ve done since the original Smackdown on the PS1, all of Yuke’s games have had absolutely abysmal load times. It’s sad really, that an otherwise great game is hampered by constant loading. Hell, after each wrestler’s intro it has to load another 5-10 seconds, then again before the match begins. And finally once the match is over, it goes to another loading screen before it shows the wrestlers celebrating. Maybe, just maybe next years game will cut back further on the loading time, but I’m not holding my breath.
Lastly I also got the Rambaldi Box-set of all five seasons of Alias. Today I finally got started with season 5. It’s kinda weird watching it as season 5 wasn’t on that terribly long ago, and I still kinda remember various bits and pieces of the episodes more-so than any of the other seasons. But it’s great to have all the seasons right there at your fingertips because the storyline for the series is pretty serial so you need to see them all to get the whole picture. And if you haven’t ever seen Alias, now is the perfect time to get ‘em all.