I love the games available for my Xbox 360. I have more than 50 titles and I’ve spent countless hours playing titles like Fallout 3, Bioshock, Grand Theft Auto IV and so on.
Unfortunately, Xbox 360 systems won’t function without a hard drive. And hard drives tend to fail. Especially if you have a dusty house. I have 15 dogs and my house collects about 15 times as much dust as normal. My Xbox 360 has failed twice in three years.I’ve had it repaired each time. The most recent failure of my original Xbox 360 happened outside the extended warranty period. Time for a new Xbox.
Order a new Xbox 360 Elite (red edition) with Resident Evil 5 included from Newegg.com. It arrives and I try to swap out my working 120GB hard drive from the old failed Xbox 360. I get a message stating that the system needs to update. The update runs. System reboots and then I get a message saying the update cannot be applied. Damn it. I call tech support. The tech support is probably in the Phillipines. When you call you get one of those infuriating automated recording systems that is supposed to have voice recognition but forces you to listen to Xbox Live advertisments while you’re trying to figure out how to get a human being on the phone.
The first human being to come on the phone after about 10 minutes of robot voice keeps putting me on hold to “check on that for your sir.” Great. After about the fifth hold session without a single helpful suggestion as to how I can resolve my problem, the phone give me a dial tone. I’ve been disconnected. Great. I call back. Another 15 minutes of my life are wasted renavigating through the robot to get to the Filipino. I have nothing against Filipinos. I do have issues with offshoring when they won’t tell you where they are from for “security reasons” – dude, I just gave you my home address and telephone number! Don’t give me bullshit. I’m not coming to the Phillipines to kill you. I just want my damn Xbox 360 to work. WTF!
After an hour of punching buttons and being putting on hold I’m told that a) you cannot swap a hard drive from a broken Xbox 360 to a new Xbox 360 for “licensing reasons” and b) you can order a free transfer kit online to move your content from one hard drive to the other. I’d like to offer a big FUCK YOU to whoever decided to inconvenience me in this way. It makes me much more likely to spend time looking for a company that doesn’t force me to jump through giant flaming hoops to use content I have paid out the ass to use. Redownloading all my content not to mention losing all my saved games every time a hard drive fails is retarded. Why isn’t there a simple, affordable backup mechanism for the Xbox 360? WHY! This is idiotic – someone at the research and design arm of Microsoft Games should have figured this out a long time ago. It will take me hours to re-download all the additional content I’ve purchased through the Xbox Live service. What the hell man? What’s more important – keeping customers loyal or making sure it is nearly impossible to move saved content around?
To compound my irritation with the people at Xbox and their Filipino support division the new hard drive that shipped with my limited edition Xbox was dead in the water. Yeah. It was defective out of the box. The tech told me to just return it to my retailer for a replacement. Why not ship me one overnight and let me return the defective one to you? I’m now disinclined to purchase another console owned by Microsoft. When you make it hard for me to enjoy any continuity in my gaming experience you make it hard for me to remain your customer.