I suppose that if it had to happen, this was the best time. My Xbox 360 seems to be on the verge of eating dirt, so to speak. It started about a two month ago. I had to move my 360 to our basement because it was getting too hot upstairs. Nothing happened right away, but eventually I got a very infrequent game freeze. I didn’t think anything of it, I had the 360 sitting right next to the TV with the power brick behind it, all in a tight space. I took the 360 out of the slot to let it cool down and moved it back upstairs. I missed the HD picture and it wasn’t so warm then, anyways. The problems went away, basically. I’ve only ever had a few freezes with the console, but all of them seem justified. Since returning from holiday, though, my 360 can’t play more than ten, twenty minutes, if that. I don’t know why it’s happened now, I unplugged both my Wii and 360 before we left, basically the only thing running was the DVR. The last time I could even load a game was getting two playthroughs of Jessica on Hard mode in Guitar Hero II. Luckily, I beat my old highscore and got five stars, which I promptly added to cherrypie. (More on that later in another post, maybe.) So, yesterday I was looking for fixes, even temporary ones. My cousins are coming over tomorrow and I’d like to have it running as they are fairly new Guitar Hero fans. I came across a number of things that basically all pointed to letting the console, and, more specifically, the power brick, breathe. Nothing worked, in fact, once I moved every thing, I got the Red Ring ‘o Death as soon as I turned the console on this morning. I tried numerous combinations, hard drive in and out, no AV cables, even the towel trick. Nothing has worked. I was actually riding on the towel trick or something else working, I wrote the first half of this post earlier, hoping I could come back and say “And here’s how I fixed it.”

I guess I have to look on the bright side. I have Super Metroid right now and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption next week. My 360 wouldn’t be getting much play time, anyways. I did want to try the skate. demo, but when the console froze during the Katamari demo I knew that it was going. I mean, if you can’t handle that… School starts very soon, as much as I’d like to ignore it, too. And better now that during the release of Rock Band or, heaven forbid, Mass Effect. (That’s right, I didn’t say Halo 3. Another plus point is that if the console takes a long time to get back I can just say it’s broken when people are bugging me to buy Halo.) So, I’ll live. I really was looking forward to playing even a little GH II this weekend, but it’s okay. I’ll take my anger out on one of the phone operators at Xbox Support.

The title is a reference to the band Freezepop, two of their members work with Harmonix, the developer of Guitar Hero. Less Talk More Rokk, a track from GH II, happened to be the last song I played before it froze for the last time. Well, I didn’t really get to play it, as the console crapped out before I finished the first chord. (Come to think of it, More Talk Less Rokk would have been a good title if I wrote this after calling Microsoft Support. Whee.)

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