RROD

With my brother back from Iraq for a couple of weeks, I've taken a trip to Fresno to spend some time with him & basically goof off. When I arrived today, he had just returned from a camping trip with my other bro Mike, so he was in his hibernate-with-the-laptop mode again. The first words out of his mouth, besides "Hi" were: "So I got a new game. COD4!"

Well, all right! Glad I brought my Xbox along. Game on!

(Wait, he came back from a warzone and he wants to play... ah, never mind; it's all good! Game on!)

So I got it all rigged up to Mom's LCD monitor, hooked up an old router I'd given to her, and got through all the layers of ridiculous pseudo-security shit she had on her computer, without breaking said layers of pseudo-security mind you. When I leave, the crappy little computer will never know I was there. It'll continue merrily churning away for 5 minutes at startup like it always has.

I inevitably resent machines like this, and those who push the software to leave them in such a state. I usually also build up an inept frustration with the ISP who, in their attempts to make setup and security as idiot-proof as possible end up making their service completely inflexible and a general pain in the ass to do anything with besides hook up the modem straight into the PC.

What happened to the days when an ISP would hand you a modem, a password, and let you have at it? Speaking of which, I love you Cruzio, and I want you back! Perhaps we can talk soon?

Anyhow, I eventually got everything set up and played a quick game of Carcassonne, which had Dad spectating. Then I brought in Guitar Hero II to spice up the selection a bit. No one cared, really. I could hear the WoW currency clinks emanating from Matt's machine -_-

So I decided to bring in the big guns: the violent, the seedy, the please-ignore-Lola-it's-not-all-about-that-really-I-swear, Grand Theft Auto IV. And a couple of seconds into it I'm thinking 1280 x 1024 looks really fantastic as a native resolution, so much sharper than the interpolated stuff HDTVs give us in 720p.

As I was marveling at this, the game froze.

A weird jittery freeze, with scanlines going haywire and jutting out in moire hues. In a panic, I hit the eject button, thinking the game just didn't support the 1024 vertical resolution. The box remained frozen, so I shut it down, booted it up and changed the resolution to 1280 x 720 and inserted the game again. It froze at roughly the same point. And I repeated the power cycle only to be greeted by the dreaded:



In some weird sense, this is a relief. The box had been giving me fake dirty disc errors since I'd started playing Oblivion when it was released, and had continued randomly complaining about non-existent dirt on almost every game I'd played. Unfortunately that error isn't the ticket to a fresh (or... "refreshed") Xbox. No, that special treatment is reserved for Microsoft's attempt to defuse an icon that, in gamer parlance, has become synonymous with "Microsoft's hardware design fails".

Incidentally, here's the funniest RROD report I found on youtube. Priceless:



The guy's blog is um... fascinating!