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Well, Crackdown that is.  That’s right, it’s killed my Xbox 360.  Binford bought it and apparently tried to play it on my Xbox, and it locked up.  Resetting the box resulted in the red three lights.  I came home later, not realizing what had happened, and the Xbox booted up, I attempted to play Crackdown, I downloaded a needed update, and it locked up again.  Restarting it gave the red three lights.  After some fiddling, I got it to work again.  I then booted it without a game, put in the Halo 2 disc, and it worked fine.  Put Crackdown back in, and it locked up again.  Some more fiddling, it comes back on.  Play even more Halo 2, everything’s fine.  Put in Crackdown disc, locks up.  Unfortunately now, no amount of fiddling has gotten it to turn back on again.

Damn.  So I called Xbox support.  They run through everything to make sure it’s not the hard drive or the power supply.  It’s not.  I give him my serial number.  He comes back and says that it’s not under warranty anymore.  Well, it needs to be sent in because he can’t fix it over the phone, he asks if that’s alright.  Of course, I tell him no.  The damn thing worked fine before Crackdown, and now it doesn’t.  Hell, it even worked with Halo 2 just fine, but stopped as soon as I put the Crackdown DVD in.  Obviously this has nothing to do with my console and a whole lot to do with the game. 

He talks to his supervisor.  They won’t charge me for the repair, but I’ll have to pay to ship it there (normally Microsoft pays for that too, at least, when it’s under warranty).  I say that that is acceptable, and he gives me all the details I need.  I’m thinking about shipping it from work, that way Microsoft still ends up paying. 

This definitely gets me wondering how non-sensical this machine is.  It comes with a hard drive.  Actually, some do, not all.  Why are the updates not being applied to the hard drive?  That way, when something happens, you can just wipe the drive and start over.  Also, how is a game causing the thing not to boot anymore?  It’s just a piece of software that runs at a very high level.  There is no reason it should be able to influence how the machine runs.  And then there’s the fact that it is a closed system.  Everyone has the same thing, and the peripherals that do come out have to go through Microsoft.  How I’d love to be able to QA programs that only have to run with one configuration, and yet, they seem to not be able to do that.  Makes you wonder…