The Joy of Hardware Failures
Having just received Ninja Gaiden (I'll post an in-depth review in a couple days) yesterday, I was quite ecstatic to be playing it all night (I played the game for about 7 to 8 hours straight, and enjoyed each and every nanosecond of it) on my good 'ol Xbox. I bought my Xbox the month it come out a few years ago, and have gotten quite a lot of play out of it. However, this morning when I booted it up to play some more Ninja Gaiden before heading off to math, I discovered, much to my dismay, that no matter what I did, the game began loading at a certain point in this one hallway and just froze. No matter how many times I tried (and I tried about 5-8 times... I'm a dedicated gamer), the game just kept freezing. And this isn't an isolated occurance either, I've been having numerous problems with games loading and even more "Unreadable Disc" errors.
So, after the 8th attempt at trying to progress in Ninja Gaiden, I finally got fed-up and called Microsoft's Xbox support line. I was very surprised to discover that I was never put on hold, and got in touch with a tech-support guy almost instantly. The guy was very nice, and I don't blame him for my upcoming gripe, as it wasn't his decision, but I'm still angry. My Xbox would cost $90 to get repaired, not including the shipping and handling fees. So I'm looking at about a $120-$130 to get my two or three year old Xbox repaired. Being that a BRAND-NEW Xbox costs about $150, there was just no way I'm going to justify getting an old one repaired, so I plan on picking up a new Xbox over the weekend.
The most aggravating part of this whole scenario is that I've read all over the internet that the Xbox's first-generation DVD drive has had NUMEROUS problems related to the ones I'm having. I've heard that Microsoft was going to call a recall on the first-generation Xbox's, but they didn't want the bad publicity. *sigh* Oh well, I guess that's the corporate world for you.