Yep, you heard it right. I currently don't have a playable Xbox 360. (Actually that statement is not true right now, though it was true 2 weeks ago, but more on that later.) Two weeks ago when my brother Scott was in town with his family my 360 decided it was tired of hanging out in Portland and wanted to head back to Microsoft. Yeah, this really sucked. I was planning on showing Scott how cool the new NCAA 2007 Football game is. My family is big Boise State fans, so I knew this was going to be a big hit. I turned on the machine and it lights up like this. Uh oh.
Carrie was freaking out, she thought we were screwed because we no longer had the receipt from when we bought the console back in November of last year. Hah, luckily we registered the product online right after we bought it, so they already had all of our information in their system, and there was no need to keep the receipt for servicing. But she didn't know that, so she was freaking out.
I first looked online at the Xbox forums and customer service pages. Those were helpful and made it easy to diagnose the problem. They listed a few steps for me to walk-through, just to be sure that the problem wasn't something else. After I walked through those steps, the knowledge base informed me that my problem was a hardware failure and that I just needed to call a certain number and Microsoft would resolve the issue for me. That made me feel good. Then I read a letter from Peter Moore talking about the cause of the issue and what Microsoft was doing to fix the situation for all the affected gamers.
We are announcing today a three-year warranty that covers any console
that displays a three flashing red lights error message. If a customer
has an issue indicated by the three flashing red lights, Microsoft will
repair the console free of charge—including shipping—for three years
from the console’s purchase date.
Talk about customer service! So anyways, they sent me a box and I mailed off my Xbox 360 last Saturday. I should get it back in about a month or so. I was so bummed that I would not be able to play Halo 3 (which at this time was only 3 days from being released). I knew what I had to do. Cough. Let's just say that over the last few days I've been able to review Halo 3 and even the wife thinks it is very cool.
I've taken a break from working on any XNA stuff in order to play with Silverlight and develop my own Twitter API. In about a month (hopefully less) I'll be done with that and can get back to developing XNA games. Later this year we should get the release of XNA Game Studio Express 2.0 which will include support for creating rich multiplayer games over Xbox LIVE using the new networking APIs. Hey, if I'm going to be writing games for Xbox Live then I need an environment to test them in, right? Jason, you know what I'm talking about, back me up here. 