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Just about an hour ago, I decided – after what was approximately a week without gaming – that I would continue to make my way through the first Lost Planet. Little did I know that that was not going to happen.
I turned my T.V. on. I grabbed my lime green Xbox controller. I pressed the Xbox logo-shaped button. I froze as the three red lights started flashing at me with synchronous grace. For a second, I felt a slight rush of worry, but – quoting Fight Club’s narrator – suddenly, I felt nothing.
After turning the Xbox on-and-off a couple of times with the same results, I opened up my laptop, launched Firefox and, a few minutes later, there I was, filling up an on-line request form.
After going through the whole repair request process, I started thinking back to my younger days. Had something like this happened to my NES, SNES, or even my PSOne, I would have probably thrown myself immediately into the arms of despair and placed my console’s fate in the hands of the nearest electronics repair shop.
That, however, was the past. Today, reality has surpassed fiction once again and the first death (try saying “first death” yourself and hear how weird that actually sounds) of an Xbox 360 has somehow become a “rite of passage” for every owner of Microsoft’s white box. What a decade ago would’ve been an alarming event for any gamer has become so predictable that it’s now routine.
As I sit typing the finishing paragraph to this rant, I imagine if “Includes first-death repair service” will ever become a back-of-the-box bullet on future consoles. And while I’m certain that everything will turn out fine in the end, I can’t help but feeling it’ll continue to be wrong, because, somehow, the day when expecting your console to fail is a completely normal thing has come.
So, what was your “First Red Ring of Death” experience like? Share your thoughts in the comments section guys. It’s group therapy time!
