I've Been Dreading This

What I got to play of SPLINTER CELL: CONVICTION was pretty awesome. In fact, out of all of the games I had been anticipating that have come out in the last few months, this is the only one that wasn't a letdown. So, naturally, my letdown had to come from someplace else...

Unfortunately, my 360, which is a few years old, picked now to start dying. No red ring of death yet, just the usual "you're about to get the RROD" symptoms of the console constantly locking up and going to a black or blue blank screen. The front of the 360 shows the normal green light, the power brick's light is green. The console just stops responding. (Even hitting the Xbox orb on the controller does absolutely nothing.) I'll reboot and it'll load up the game and get to the menu, or into the game a little bit and die.

It started freezing every so often in the game. Then it got really bad on what I'm assuming is the last level. I can't play more than a minute or two, or sometimes get past the main menu of the game before the 360 locks up and the screen goes black.

It's not a ventilation issue, since none of the vents are covered, and I even moved the Xbox and balanced it on an empty box to see if that made any difference. I also unhooked the hard drive, no dice. Screwed around with the cables, etc. The machine and power brick are both cool to the touch, and it's cool inside my house, so it doesn't seem like it's over-heating.


I thought that maybe if I turned the machine off for awhile, it would help. So I watched LOST and came back and the problem is even worse.

I had read that other people were having problems with CONVICTION freezing due to a patch or whatever. But then I popped in another game and the same thing is happening, which means it's the machine, not the game.

It figures, the one game that I've desperately been waiting to play for a few years now, and this is when Microsoft's junk box decides to quit. Fear of this happening is exactly why when a game is available for both the PS3 and the 360, I opt for the PS3 version now.

I'm not under warranty. The cost of having it fixed is so high, that really, you're better off just buying a replacement. The problem with that is, dropping $200 on another console simply isn't economically practical for me right now. There's the do it yourself repair method, but honestly, that looks like a ton of hassle, and I'd probably screw it up. Plus, there's no guarantee that doing that would fix the problem, so I might waste a few hours on something that won't even work.

Now, I wish I hadn't bought the game, since I could've used that money for something else, and maybe held out for a Playstation 3 version in the future. I'm tempted to just pirate the damn thing for the PC, just so I can finish the game. (Hey, I did pay for the game.) But it's not Ubisoft's fault that Microsoft made a shoddy machine. Plus their DRM is supposed to be really awful.