Skip to main content

The new 360: Black is slimming

Over this last weekend, I downloaded Dead Rising 2: Case 0, which is sort of a prequel to Dead Rising 2, but a digital only title. Quick review: If you liked Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 seems to be everything it was, but better. $5 for more Dead Rising? I'll take 5!

I started to notice my screen was kind of flickering green while playing though, I just assume it was a bug, since it was a new game, and that I'd be getting a patch in the next few days that would fix it.

The next time I turned the 360 on though, it would turn on, but no video would display. I tried all of the standard stuff, switching cables, hooking it straight up to the TV, trying a different source on the same cable. In the end, it was toast, and I could pay Microsoft $100 to repair, and risk something else crapping out after 90 days, or I could buy one of the new slims, and I did have $150 in Amazon gift cards.

New 360 it was!


Okay, so, I got the new 360, it's not really "slim" but it is quiet. It's a little deeper, a little less broad, but just as thick, although it's got a wasteline now.

My old 360 had a piece of electrical tape covering the IR receiver, since I have a remote that works with it that I use for something else. I don't want the 360 turning on when I just want to turn on my media center. So, I forgot to cover the receiver on the new one since it's all black anyway, and accidentally turned it on, and it was an hour or so before I noticed the light was on.

So, the process of transferring data from your old system to your new? Really redundant. The instructions for the hard drive transfer cable say to just plug the old drive into the transfer cable, and then plug the other end into the new system, turn it on, and you should get a prompt to transfer.

Slight problem is that the new system won't recognize that there's a transfer kit plugged in until you do all of the initial setup stuff. Which includes recovering my gamertag, which takes 10 minutes, when it was right there on the old drive! So, okay, you do that, then you can run the transfer kit, which takes a couple of hours, depending on how much stuff you've got on your system. Except, there's this weird licensing aspect of the 360. Downloaded content is tied to your gamertag, and your system. So if you transfer your gamertag to another system, you'll be able to access all of your DLC after downloading, but no one else on that console will be able to, unless your gamertag is signed in. This is important to me, because my wife plays a lot of the Live arcade games, but doesn't actually have Live ID herself.

So, there's a license transfer tool that Microsoft offers, you go to xbox.com and sign in, and then click on a few links, but you have to be signed in on the new console. I discovered that I wasn't signed in after doing the hard drive transfer. I tried to sign in, and was told that my credentials were wrong, how can that be? I just recovered my gamertag! I ended up having to recover my gamertag, again, I can only assume that after the initial recovery, the hard drive transfer somehow screwed it up. Ten minutes later again, I can transfer all of my licenses, and I think it worked, I haven't really confirmed it yet though.

So, bottom line, it's kind of like doing any sort of Microsoft upgrade, lots of false starts where you find that you didn't do something exactly right. Still better than dealing with the PS3 firmware upgrades and patches though.

Comments

  1. Best thing about the new slimmer 360? The free 120 gb hard drive from the old 360!!!!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Naked Heat: Reviewing this book makes my brain hurt

I finished the latest book by Richard Castle a few days ago, and I've been thinking about how I want to write this review ever since. You see, Richard Castle is a rock star amongst murder mystery novelists, he struck it big with his series of Derek Storm novels, but shocked the world by killing the character at the end of the last book in the series. After that, he found inspiration in NYPD detective Kate Beckett, and based his new character, Nikki Heat, off of her. Naked Heat is the second book in the Nikki Heat series. What's so weird about that? I'm sure all three of my regular readers already know, but none of these people are real, Rick Castle and Det. Beckett are both characters on ABC's crime/drama/comedy series Castle. Haven't watched Castle? For shame, I highly recommend it, it's a perfect guilty pleasure movie, a series of one and done murder mysteries, that are fairly light hearted, with a great comedy dynamic between the characters of Castle, Becket

Final Fantasy XIII: I may not finish this

The latest installation in Square Enix's flagship series, Final Fantasy XIII does a number of really cool things. I don't want to take a lot of time going into the mechanics under the hood, but you need to get the basics in order to get a feel for the game. The battle system is real time, the battle constantly goes on even while you're deciding what to do, you're only in direct control over the party leader though, keeps you from being overwhelmed, the other two party members are only controllable only insofar as you can dictate what class they use. Class management is an important part of the battle system, only commandoes can physically attack enemies, and ravagers deal elemental damage, along with a myriad of other classes, each character starts off with access to a small selection, and by the end of the game will have extensive access to three classes, as well as marginal access to the remaining classes. Which classes you use are determined by paradigms, sort of pre

Lemme Tell You About The Transformer, Astrotrain, And Why He's My Favorite

       I am, quite obviously, a massive fan of Transformers, but I grew up in kind of a weird time for being a fan. Really, I'm just a LITTLE too young. I remember seeing my brother, who was six years older than I, get all of the coolest Transformers, and then by the time that I started being able to ask for Transformers for myself, the nature of Transformers had greatly changed. I have a great anecdotal story about him clipping Soundwave (arguably one of the coolest Transformers toys ever, which turned into a microcassette player) to his shorts and climbing a tree. He then proceeded to fall 30 feet out of that tree, and land on Soundwave, which poked him right in the kidney, and he peed blood for a week.        While I still have a great deal of fondness for them, Powermaster Optimus Prime is just not as cool of a toy as the original Optimus Prime. Notably, if you landed on Powermaster Optimus Prime, he probably wouldn't puncture your kidney, but the original Optimus Prime mig