Blargh.
MS killed quite a few potential 360 purchases in my circle of friends and family. The performance of the console the last few days has been abysmal, to say the least.
It's very annoying if every fifth button press results in a generic Live error. At least my Geometry wars and Puzzle Quest purchases only took three tries each. Cannot wait for GW Galaxies though.
I'm not angry at MS or anything, I just... well, the timing was pretty spot-on. The last week was the single time where my friends and family were actually interested in the 360, and not only did it fail, it failed spectacularly. Beautifully. The only thing it didn't do is catch on fire or RROD, but who knows, maybe it wanted to leave that to the day Rez is released.
I had a bunch of friends over for the last two days of the year, a little premature (and prolonged) New Years Eve because I'd spend that with family.
I have quite a few movies, but my friends know them inside-out by now, so we rely on rentals. The whole shebang was a last-minute chaotic idea. Thing is, the rental place was closed. No surprise there, and hopefully no problem, I thought: there's always the MS video store and my new christmas gifts (Pans Labyrith and some Bud Spencer&Terrence Hill movies).
I mean, 300 in HD for 100 MS points is an amazing deal (wtf at the SD version being nearly 4 times as expensive though).
Yyyyeah. Didn't happen. I could barely access the 360 core functionality, much less download the movie... we ended up doing some weird flash drive juggling since my Video-out capable PC is broken and my friends' NTFS formatted external HDD could not be read by the 360. So copy files from NTFS drive to flash drive (slow PC, sloooooooow USB/flash/HDD), plug it into the 'box, pray that sound/video works, watch, repeat.
Very clunky.
Even the Games didn't want to cooperate. Halo 3 crashed when someone pushed the guide button at an apparently unopportune time. Couple that with the hardrive spinning symbol of doom on every fucking blade and you can maybe see why all of my friends now pretty much laugh in my face whenever I mention my 360. Can't say I can blame them, from what they've experienced the 360 is a horribly broken mess.
Somewhat happy ending: ~30 hours later it finally finished downloading the blasted thing. I took my drive to my family and wanted to watch it on their 360. Hope springs eternal! Just recover the gamertag and watch the movie, right? Well fuck that too. Recovering the gamertag turned out to be a slow, ugly, and extremely annoying process that took all of two days of repeated attempts. Stupid fucking Error 786532795429875497265129754923412539752318265324654287 or whatever, every fucking time. Best thing is that it wouldn't let me use the stored login since the very first failed unfinished recovery apparently killed off the gamertag for good.
Nonetheless, we got to see the freaking movie. Tonight we dine in hell and all that.
Obligatory pants explodification:
Puzzle Quest so good.
SO. GOOD.
Can't stop playing.
