sorry. It’s… Hard.. But. My xbox360 died just the another night. Poor thing had.. Ooh. I’m guessing over 7,000 hours of gameplay logged on it. Definitely my most played console right now. It was inevitable really. I had one of those “early adopter” models that had a failure rate of 33.3%. Meaning. One out of 3 of every xbox360’s sold from launch day to late 2006 WILL fail and stop functioning. It was a severe design flaw that, overtime, caused the graphics CPU (the GPU) to lose solder connection to the motherboard. The heat sink on this chip was not up to pair and is now costing Microsoft over 2billion to correct. Kudos to them though for not ignoring the issue. I was on the phone for about 25-30 minutes. Got a shipping label, my repair is free! So. Yay for that! And now on to my bitching!
With the close of 2008 came a pretty damned good year for gaming in general. In many.. MANY sectors of commerce came declines of revenue. We are in a recession after all. But the gaming sector saw a 15% increase in sales! This is both good. And bad news in my mind. And here is why. While people bought more games and consoles. They effectively shunned everything new. For years, gamers trolled on forums, blogged on facebook and botched at uninterested Gamestop employees about how stale the market has gotten with all these sequels! “Where are all the new games?!”. “I don’t want another call of duty or Madden!” “I like Boobies!” (ok, that last one was me..) I was one of them. I’m getting tired of sequels. I want a new IP (Intellectual Property). So this year was exciting because there where a few really good looking games that told different stories and changed up the game play and innovated there genre. There was, what seemed like, a lot of interested behind these titles. Which is why I’m both baffled and surprised none of them sold well at all!
