Although I can’t really say that I found the Xbox live service to have been miserably broken over the Holidays, there have been a whole lot of other people who feel quite differently. (I guess when Halo 3 is your entire life, your priorities get a bit askew.)
Not content to rest on the public apology that was given by Marc Whitten (Xbox Live General Manager) on January 3, the following was posted earlier today:
“We’re pleased to announce that from 2:00 a.m. PST Wednesday, January 23, 2008 through 11:59 p.m. PST, Sunday, January 27, 2008 you can download the full version of the recent Xbox LIVE Arcade game, Undertow free of charge.”
That’s a really cool way to handle something like this, and it certainly helps to make one feel better about the cost involved with keeping the Xbox online.
And what if you’ve already purchased Undertow? According to Xbox Live Director of Programming, Major Nelson, the support team will take care of you.
Wait until you Xbox gets the red ring and you run into the XBox live DRM madness. They owe us way way more than a downloadable game. How about they fix some of their customer service problems to start with.
Oh god, how I dread the red ring. Regardless of how many times I try to convince myself that I’m the lucky dude who got the one 360 that WON’T die, I know that it’s coming.
Have a vision of the future . . .
http://www.achieve360points.com/articles/my-experience-with-18004myxbox/
Honestly, my experience with having my 360 die off wasn’t all that bad. I called, they sent me a box, I put the Xbox in it, dropped it off at the UPS store, and three weeks later got a notice to pick it up. It was EASY.
The only alraming thing was that when I went to the UPS depot to pick it up, there were two other guys there also picking up 360s that had been replaced. And Buffalo’s not that big of a city, so its not like its just “Well, so many people live there, the odds are that there would be three people getting xboxs replaced on the same day.”
I will say, it would be nice if just one of the systems I’d bought since the 16-bit era didn’t die prematurely.
I had a similar experience with my 360 replacement but the problems come if you have downloadable content of any kind. If you have any Live Arcade games from before your system died try playing them offline. Or have your wife (in my case gf) play it with her gamertag. The next time it dies I’m going to be f’ed over on all my rockband songs, unless they fix the issue.
I have sent in 3 Xbox’s now and they were all easy to do. I just think that it’s ridiculous that I am one my fourth box now. I went through four PS2’s in the systems entire life span, how many more 360’s are going to die on me. I’m in the same boat with Chris, I have a ton of Rock Band songs downloaded, I don’t wanna get screwed. The PS3 is doing so many things right this generation and they are getting so little respect for it…kinda makes me mad.
Christ, this doesn’t sound good about the DRM shit…AT ALL. I’ve got quite a bit of money invested in Live downloads — from games, to content packs, to tv shows.
Red rings, please stay away. Ugh.