Category: Consoles
Just over 2 years after I first got my Xbox 360 and I have been graced with the 3 flashing red lights or “Red Ring of Death’ as it is affectionatley known.
I’m particuarly narked as I just bought GTA IV a few weeks back and hadn’t had a good chance to play it until tonight!
So, I called Xbox support here in the UK (though I think I was re-routed to India along the way) and my fears were confirmed. My Xbox is dead. They are sending me a returns lable via email and have asked that I wrap the Xbox in bubble wrap and place it in a plain cardboard box. When I asked if I could return it in the original box they stated that under no circumstances should I return it in a box with any Microsoft or Xbox insignia. How strange… perhaps they are trying to hide the number or returns from UPS staff here in the UK.
I gave the nice lady a bit of grief about the fact that I had to provide my own coffin for faulty hardware that they had produced but to their credit they confirmed that the returned Xbox would be subject to a further 3 year warranty and that they would provide me with a months free Xbox Live Gold membership. Not bad.
Apparently it should take 3 weeks for my Xbox to be returned minus the three red rings. I’ll keep you updated…
Update: My Xbox 360 arrived back home today, just 1 week to the day after it left, it’s been to Germany, had the mortherboard replaced and a new faceplate (Thanks Microsoft!), the old faceplate had been vandalised by my son. I also got a months free Xbox Live Gold Membership.
Add to this the fact that it’s significantly quiter when idle than it was before, I’m well impressed. Good job. :)
Having just read through a really rather good interview over at Ars Technica I was astounded by following statement made by Ben Kuchera:
There is no real difference in quality based on what I’ve seen between HD DVD (Xbox 360) and Blu-ray (PS3). Keep in mind that unless your display can handle a 1080p or 1080i resolution the PS3 will downgrade the image into 480p.
What? That is some crazy shit. To quote one of the commenter’s on the article:
It blows my mind that Sony put the Blu-ray drive into the PS3 as a trojan horse that I’m forced to pay for, but it can’t even support my 720P (Sony!) HD television…
I’d be interested to hear from anyone out there with a PS3 as to what experience they have with playback of Blu-ray movies on a 720p HDTV.
In what can only be described as an inspired move, Microsoft is bringing HD-quality movies to the 360 without requiring that owners purchase the external HD DVD drive.
On November 22nd, Xbox 360 will become the first gaming console in history to provide HD TV shows and movies directly to (US) gamers in their own living rooms. Xbox 360 owners will be able to download full-length TV shows to own, and will be able to rent movies via download from the Xbox Live® network.
via Major Nelson.
It will be interesting to see how Sony responds to this as bit by bit they seem to be losing the upper hand which they once held over high capacity media and 1080p output.
News on the Autumn 360 dashboard update is out. I’m well chuffed to see that they’re including support for streaming video from any PC running Windows Media Connect or similar (WMP11 or Zune Software). This was a much requested feature and true to their word Microsoft are actually listening to the users.
The Autumn update also includes a new high def mode, the illustrious 1080p which Sony will have you think is the holy grail of HD. In reality it’s nothing to write home about until console hardware is significantly more powerful, enough at least to output at 1080p and still 4x anti-alias like the 360 currently does at 720p.
Elsewhere there are a bunch of UI enhancements, most notably in the Live Arcade though from the screenies I saw over at Xbox.com it looks like the UI team may have departed slightly from the iconic interface. Will be a shame if they have but I’ll take a look tmrw and post back here with first impressions.
Update: Well, I powered up the 360 this morning at about 10:30am, no prompt to get the dash update but starting a game seemed to force a check and the update downloaded and installed.
First thing I headed off to check was the new Live Arcade menu area, there are some great improvements here in terms of functionality but it’s painful to see that the UI standards adhered to elsewhere in the dashboard have been thrown to one side. I wonder what the original interface design team from AKQA think about it?
Video streaming from my Windows XP box works a treat though videos have to be plain vanilla Windows Media Video (WMV) to show up in the 360 media blade. Thankfully it’s an easy (albeit lengthy) task to take any DivX encoded AVI’s and convert them to WMVs using Windows Movie Maker (or whatever it’s called).
Update: Actually, although it’s easy, the results are piss poor. Instead I suggest you take a look at the rather brilliant write up on Joystiq.com RE Transcoding & streaming videos on Xbox 360. Not only is it considerably faster than using Windows Movie Maker, but the results are infiniteley better too! :)
110 High-Definition Xbox 360 games showcased at TGS.
In addition, Microsoft announced that its fall dashboard update, scheduled for release later this year, will allow all Xbox 360 consoles around the world to output game and movie content in 1080p resolution.
Wow, didn’t see that one coming. Up until now the PS3 was slated as the only console capable of outputting 1080p. Hats off to Microsoft for yet again demonstrating their commitment to the Xbox 360 as an evolving platform.
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