One thing I didn’t mention in my last post was that I nearly wasn’t able to play AC on release day because my 360 decided that Saturday night (during a party I was having at my house) would be a good time to start failing. It wasn’t anything as simple as the red ring of death though.

You could boot up the system and play something normally for a while, but eventually the screen would flip to “blue mode” where everything had a horrible blue tint to it. I tried out my PS2 and, alarmingly, the screen had a weird tint to it. That turned out to be just coincidence though; one of Steve’s friends had jarred the PS2 and the component cable came a bit loose. So, “luckily” it did end up being the 360: a failing video card to be exact. There was also a coincidentally timed DVD drive issue that put a slight scuff mark on my copy of Halo 3, but that one can be chalked up to human error…

I was rather bummed about my console’s slow death, especially so close to the release of AC (and Mass Effect). It seemed for sure that I’d be waiting for a box to come from Microsoft and would be lucky to play some of these games this time in December. But then I remembered that I had a Best Buy product replacement plan! Then I also remembered hearing about many stories of people having awful luck actually using their replacement plan. I did some looking at the PRP and it mentioned all kinds of things about obtaining a voucher and other scary things.

Not hoping for much I called my local Best Buy and asked them if I’d be able to come in and swap out my broken 360 there, without going through all the hassle of getting a voucher for my PRP. Somewhat surprisingly, they said yes. They just had to check that they had a Xbox 360 Premier in stock, which they did.

So I bundled everything up and hurried over there to get it taken care of. I was still expecting some kind of trouble while trying to swap it out; better to be cautious than over excited, right?

Thankfully (and somewhat amazingly) I didn’t really have to worry. I went right up to the customer service counter and said “My 360 is not working, I want to use my PRP to swap out for a new one.” The lady asked what was wrong with it, I filled her in and just like that she called for a floor associate to go grab a new one for me. Once everything was in order I had them swap hard drives with me so that I could keep all the stuff I downloaded (I have a lot of arcade games and saves on there that I really didn’t want to lose) and I was on my way. Pretty straight forward, I’d have to say. I was so pleased with the experience in fact that I bought another 2-year replacement plan on my new 360 (this being technically my third one, the first one I bought was DOA, so I went and exchanged it that same day).

And you know, despite the hassle it turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise. The new 360 is the newest revision and has the HDMI port on it as well as the new board/processor that supposedly runs cooler. And on top of that the new box they gave me came bundled with Forza 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance; two games that I didn’t have and kind of wanted (but not enough to pay for). That alone paid for my second replacement plan.

I can’t say I’m pleased that the 360 has such a failure rate - replacement plans definitely add to the total cost of ownership - but it beats owning a PS3 and not having any good games to play.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Anything and tagged with xbox360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.