Red lights at night, can’t finish the fight…

…red lights in the morning, hardware warning. So as you can probably tell from the title, the dreaded red ring of death has struck down my XBox 360. Of course, when you have a launch day console that hasn’t failed in 21 months, you know it will fail sometime. But why oh why did this failure have to coincide with the launch of Halo 3? My still-shrinkwrapped copy of the game is sat next to the space where my console should be, and what a sad sight it makes!

I’d had the warning signs. A couple of weeks ago I found that Tiger Woods was starting to freeze sporadically. But it only happened maybe 3 or 4 times in total. And then this week brought the dreaded red lights. And then the disbelief. The feeling that says “it’ll be alright. I’ll just turn it off and back on and everything will work.”. If only it were true. Some advice I can offer about arranging the repair though. Don’t, whatever you do, try and organise it through the XBox Support website. I did this, and when I rang up to query where my packing label was to send the console back, was told “oh you should have rung us, the website doesn’t really work” (not the easiest thing to make out in broken english!). Great. Thanks for that. Perhaps, rather than telling that to your customers, you should be telling this to the website team so they can fix it?

So UPS have been and taken my console away to the repair centre, and I now have 4 weeks without my XBox. Very annoying. I guess it’ll give me some time to get some levelling done in Lord of the Rings Online instead, and when the console comes back, finish the fight I most certainly will…