nick.pazoles.com

I got by XBOX 360 in 2006. We had just moved into a new apartment, bought our first HD TV and the Playstation 2 was starting to show it’s age. I sold my PS2 to subsidize my purchase so it wasn’t a huge out of pocket expense.

Probably like many people who bought 360s around that time, I got the “red ring of death (RROD)” less than a year after purchase. Microsoft was in so deep with bad PR by this time that they paid for shipping and sent me 30 free days of XBOX Live Gold. Since then I haven’t really had any problems. I am not what I would consider a heavy user. I don’t play everyday and can go weeks without picking it up (in fact in between my Call of Duty: World at War binge and the release of NCAA Football 10 I barely touched it for a month).

Over the last month, between the bachelor party and the wedding, the 360 was moved between the office and the living room a couple of times. I don’t know if this resulted in some unnecessary jostling but after returning to it’s home in the office, weird graphics issues began to surface. Color would get all crazy and the screen would flicker light crazy. If I unplugged the red component cable the flicker would go away but obviously the color is missing anything that comes through the red cable. My hope was that this was a bad cable. At times the video wouldn’t even come on when I turned on the XBOX (but I could hear the audio so I knew it was booting properly). I ordered a cheap replacement but it made no difference. At this point I succumbed to the fact that my XBOX was in a sense dead.

I was not exactly sure how I should react to this revelation. Part of my says that I got 3 years out of this piece of technology. While that does not seem like a lot (especially when you consider many people have SNES and N64s that still work), nowadays maybe it’s not that crazy. I have had computer hard drives that died after a couple of years and others than are still going strong 5+ years later. You hope that a video game console would at least outlive it’s desiredness. What I mean is, if my 360 died shortly after the XBOX 3 (whatever it will be called) came out, then I could live with that. But clearly I am frustrated after a mere 3 years.

My gut reaction was, screw Microsoft, I am getting a Playstation 3. And despite 4 game purchases in the last 6 months I was willing to make that sacrifice. Then I remembered a key fact, I owned the original Rock Band (and associated instruments). That was a near $200 investment that I just made 2 years ago (wow has it been that long?). I enjoy Rock Band (and the multiple Guitar Hero games we have), have paid for downloaded songs and just bought Beatles Rock Band. A rough estimate of how much we have spent on “rhythm” games is probably around $400 (which in retrospect is just insane). With that must invested, and me pretty sure that I would never buy any of these instruments again, I couldn’t give on the XBOX.

I originally planned to just buy an XBOX Arcade, since my assumption is that everything else on my existing XBOX works. But I got roped in to buying the Modern Warfare 2 special edition for $400. Basically for $200 more than the arcade, I got a 250 GB (!) hard drive, a copy of MW2 (which I was going to spend $60 on anyway) and 2 new black wireless controllers (which allowed me to return on we got for our wedding). It really only cost me $80 more out of pocket than I would have spent with the Arcade and I think a 250 GB hard drive and slick looking XBOX were worth it.

A few months ago my friend Chris had been telling me that I should start playing Call of Duty: World at War on XBOX Live with him. I had only played online a few times and that was almost 3 years ago when I had just gotten my XBOX and had the free 30 days to use. I only played NCAA Football and it just wasn’t fun to me so that was the end of that. But I had another 30 days to use, so I signed up and let’s just say I got hooked.

I remember playing online way back in high school. We used to dial-up to this one guy and play Command and Conquer. We didn’t do it many times but it was pretty fun to play against someone online. My friend and I would team up and strategize and see if we could outwit the other guy. I never did any online gaming after that until college.

My freshman year roomate was hugely into Counterstrike. I knew what Half-Life was but had never heard of Counterstrike. So he got me into trying it and I was hooked. We played on the LAN and even setup a server. There were always people on (it was engineering school!) so you could always get a game. Before long we were having LAN parties and even clans for each floor! (We were DK7, Dark Knights of 7). I know of at least 1 person who dropped out exclusively because of CS. After that got old, I played some Diablo 2 and that was pretty much the only game I played online until post-college.

After I got out of college and had a job, I got bored and so my friend (the same one who got me into CS) and decided to start playing Battlefield 2. We were into for a while but had trouble finding times to play together so it didn’t last all that long. Fast forward a few years to playing Call of Duty.

It was a pretty fun 6 weeks. I wasn’t playing everyday, but almost and I put some serious hours in on the weekends. It was totally fun and for a while I could see how fun an addicting it was. But once you make it to level 65 (the highest level initially) and go to Prestige Level 1 (basically starting back over from level 1) the novelty starts to wear off. I certainly had improved, but I don’t think that I can get a whole lot better without logging even more time playing. And that just isn’t worth it. Add to it the wanks online and it gets tiring.

There are silver linings though. I had a lot of fun playing with friends and I would love playing with friends anytime. If I had enough peeps I would try to get some private games together. I already have a spot in an Online dynasty for NCAA Football 2010. I would love to play some co-op HAWX or even co-op CoD:WaW. I think in moderation online gaming could be fun. If nothing else CoD got me to buy an XBOX live membership, so I no longer have any excuses.