Ok so the Xbox 360 hmmmm?

So let find the Problems...

Actually, the device itself doesn’t have problems. It’s something else, and it rhymes with “bustomer bervice” or “pustomer pervice” or something like that.

OK. The device actually does have a problem, but the problem I encountered might just be something wrong with my machine.

Anyway, read on.

The Hardware

I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about the hardware. I’ve hit this stage in my life where hardware is advancing too quickly for me to keep up with it, and there’s just too damned much quality stuff out there for me to nitpick.

Bottom line, the box is powerful. It has, like, ten fusion-powered five-hundred jigahertz something or others, and it’s liquid cooled with water diverted from a local river (note that you must live within at least two miles of the nearest river to be able to plug in your 360). It has something like twelve parallel artificially intelligent four-dimensional world-rendering engines built in, and it’s currently responsible for running the entire civilian infrastructures of at least eighteen western nations with more to follow. It also supports time travel with an add-on card.

From what I understand, we  are losing $126 per unit on parts alone. What that translates to after all other expenses have been accounted for is the kind of math that only a 360 could perform (ninety-six trillion times per second, I might add).

The only thing I can really comment on knowledgeably is this: It isn’t a big, ugly box like the first one. Something we’d been missing for years on the PC side of things was the whole “pretty-computers-are-neat” thing. The 360 is a big step in the right direction. It’s compact, nicely shaped, and has a modular design that lets you snap accessories right onto its chassis (or whatever the external box thing in which everything resides is called).

But, as we all know from having watched fantastic hardware come and go over the years, success is about the software.

The Software

When you plug in a legacy Xbox, you’re taken to a greenish screen that lets you do really exciting things like set the time (and date). That’s cool if you happen to live in a world where the space-time continuum is in constant flux (that is, if you live in a Star Trek episode, which most of us don’t), as you could spend most of your time just trying to keep up with the changes. It’d be like a game in itself.

For the rest of us, it was just a boring screen. It didn’t even get interesting until you stuck something in the CD tray (usually a CD, although trying to put a bologna sandwich in the tray would be interesting, too (check your warranty before trying this)).

The 360 is very different in that the “Dashboard” is a beautiful, HD masterpiece of well designed UI. You can watch videos, listen to music, browse around Xbox Live, play with themes, pictures, and other neat things. Something tells me that some of these features might also have been available with the original Xbox, but that stupid green screen never compelled me to explore. I usually did what I could to get rid of it, sometimes resorting to kicking the TV off its stand just so I wouldn’t have to be subjected to its dumb, green stare any longer.

With the 360, as long as I’m online, I can actually entertain myself just by hanging out in the Dashboard. There really is stuff to do. I’ve been downloading movie trailers in 720p, which is a treat. There are also game demos, themes, and other gear available.

But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. The proper Xbox Live review is going to come later in the review.

Oh, screw it. I’ll just get to it now.

Xbox Live

The fundamentals of Xbox Live haven’t changed with the 360, but its integration with the console and games is very tight now (as in: I finally understand what I can do with the service). I tried to enjoy Xbox Live when it first went online, but couldn’t. I didn’t like the idea of paying a monthly fee just for the right to connect to other people and play games online. I mean, that’s pretty much all it did (as far as I could tell). I’ve had, and cancelled, three Xbox Live accounts since late 2003. I think I had spent a total of about six hours actually using it, none of them especially memorable.

After doinking around with Live on the 360 (you get a “Silver” membership for free), I decided to upgrade to the “Gold” account. The main difference is that “Gold” lets me play multiplayer games. With Silver, you can rank yourself against other online players in single player games, and you have access to many features of Xbox Live, but you can’t actually play with other people. I still think it sucks that I have to pay to play with other people, but it’s fairly cheap (around $50 for a year), and it’s totally worth it.

The one problem I’ve had with Xbox Live is customer service. It just plain sucks. In fact, it’s the worst customer service I’ve ever received for any product at any time in any country from any company for any amount of money. I’d rather try to get ninety fraudulent AOL accounts in my name cancelled than have to call Xbox Live support one more time.

To make a long story short, I wanted to get my old gamertag, “Neopoleon,” back. But, I cancelled the account a few months ago after my debit card was stolen, and the tag was tossed into a sort of gamertag purgatory that I didn’t know existed. If you cancel an account, your tag gets sucked back into the system and remains there, encased in a pillar of fire, to be visited only by Dante and Virgil on their wanderings, until such time as judgment has befallen its poor soul and decided whether or not it should be sent back to the land of the living or the great bit bucket in the sky.

I didn’t know this, and neither did any of the CSRs I spoke with. I was juggled around, transferred, dropped, and hung-up on. I was given bad information, support tickets were created, support tickets were lost(!), and a supervisor, at the end of this four day mess, basically told me that I was an idiot for even thinking that it could be done, and that it isn’t his fault his CSRs may have taken me on a wild goose chase that lasted from Thanksgiving until last night.

Sunday was probably the worst of it. It seems we use an offshore call center on Sunday, and the experience was terrible. The connection was bad, rife with loud clicks and hissing, and even without the interference, the CSRs and I wouldn’t have had a hope of understanding each other anyway. They didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t have even the simplest answers, and seemed to freeze every time the conversation moved away from whatever was on the scripts in front of their faces.

I’m not a racist, but we need to rethink this whole offshore call center thing. It might be cheaper, but if customers aren’t getting service, and if they’re getting pissed off, then it might just be better to make Xbox Live support a Monday through Friday affair, keeping it open only when we know that we can do something beneficial.

And that’s enough of that.

My new gamertag, which I had to adopt because I couldn’t get the old one back, is “FlamingTorpedo.” Be sure to add me to your friend list if you’ve got one.