Xbox 360 is an unreliable piece of shit

[The Dude]

Uhh, for the uninformed, what am I supposed to be looking at?

[Dot50Cal]

The multi colored artifacts. Its a sign of my GPU dying. A little over a month. I bet if I actually played the system it would have happened on day one, since this is the first time I'm really playing a game on 360 since I got my refurbished one back from Microsoft on Nov 2nd.

[rewak]

Keeping my mouth shut

[Darkmoon]

...well, that looks horribly familiar.

[The Dude]

Wow, thats pretty shitty.
Friend of mine got hers refurbised and repaired by microsoft, awhile back and said hers is playing up again now, have to wonder what they do to it.

[Darkmoon]

Supbar components, most likely. The thing is built as cheaply as humanly possible, and possibly with this kinda thing in mind. The extended warranty for red rings has helped there image come back up...but plenty of folk, like me, don't get red rings. So each time they replace a component that most likely cost 50p they get £65. Talk about a profit margin.

[Umon Daisuke]

Gamewatch's tests last year pointed the fingers at extremely poor heat sinks. They've went as far as calling them completely useless.

[TheSelfishGene]

I'm thinking of buying one.
A 20Gb pack is like $700 Australian, and an Elite here in Japan is like $460. So if I was going to buy one, I'd be dumb not to get one here. I emailed Microsoft some serious questions about region encoding, and if it died, getting a JP console serviced in Australia (would it be under wrranty?)
I mentioned my brother's 360 has had some problems (hard drive not GPU).
Here's the reply


"Thank you for writing Xbox Customer Support!



I’m really sorry that you’re having a problem on your Xbox console. I understand that you want to know why it is so much cheaper on Japan than Australia. With regards to this matter, the currency of Japan is different on Australia. If you purchase a Japan console, you need to pay for the out of region repair because you purchase it on other countries but if you purchase the console to same country and there is a problem on it, then it will be repair as warranty. Also the game disc of Japan is different on Australia Game Disc. All game disc of the Xbox 360 console is region coded. The following regions use the corresponding game encoding standards:



• North America and South America (United States, Canada, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil): NTSC

• Asia (Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan): NTSC-J

• Europe, South Africa, India, Australia, and New Zealand: PAL.



And there is no region locking of disc because the Xbox 360 console is built in the same country as well. Thank you for your time and consideration about this matter.



For further assistance, please don't hesitate to write back or call Xbox Phone Support at your earliest convenience, and we will be happy to help you."

Hard to fully understand, without seeing my original enquiry, but still, I was pretty unimpressed. Doesn't really answer any questions. The whole disc coding thing is very confusing. Are they talking about PAL/NTSC formats??

[Rombie]

Yeah they are. It's the same region formatting thats existed on most consoles for decades at this point. Sorry if you know this, but some people have no clue.

PAL and NTSC exist because of the flow of electricity conversion to cause the number of refresh cycles on the existing television screen. The number of cycles (or scan lines) the better quality the image (this is about as simple as I can explain it). There is the quality split then between PAL and NTSC, but then NTSC is split again into regions, such as NTSC-U/C (NTSC United States and Canada), and NTSC-J (NTSC Japan).

Because most games are made in Japan or the US, the PAL quality of games until recently was usually suffering from poor conversion, which filled the missing scan space with black (thus causing letterboxing) or slowing of the game as a result (NTSC works at 30FPS, PAL works at 25) - see Onimusha or Devil May Cry for two great examples of this in work. Also the PAL version of Tekken Tag for slowdown gone wrong.

Games or consoles often now allow the games to boot on PAL60 which basically keeps them in line with the full screen and speed of the NTSC version.

Ironically however NTSC is the inferior signal quality of the two (quite often joking referred to as "Never The Same Color" because of it, it actually stands for National Television Systems Committee). It has lower resolution and picture quality issues.

Of course with the advent of HDTV where everything is displayed in scale-resolution at a progressive or interlaced ratio, this sort of encoding shouldn't really matter anymore - yet only Sony has been the only company not to keep region coding standard for their platforms (both PS3 and PSP). There are _some_ games on the 360 which are without region, but the majority aren't.

Counter arguments to this reason are:
profits (because you can't afford to run, something like an Australian regional office, if ALL the games are bought and sold from the US or Japan);
piracy (because the games get pirated on region, which cuts down pirate levels); and
localization (ie. translating it to various foreign languages, usually one of the bigger delays to the PAL market).

You are correct that a Japanese console is cheaper, and it would be great to reply that even taking into account shipping and conversion between Yen and AU$ that it's still overly expensive, but it won't get you anywhere in the end because they can can refuse service on the console because it wasn't purchased in that country. Sad to say.

[TheSelfishGene]

Thanks for the awesome reply.
I know a little bit about PAL vs NTSC, and electricity too. This new HD business I know nothing about but. I'll wait till all that becomes cheaper, then I'll get involved.

I'd run all those counter argumens through my head too. I'm just pondering what would actually be different between a JP 360, and say an Ausralian or US one. Obviously the lanugage it displays. But hardware wise, wouldn't it be very similar, with just the power cable and transformer differing from region to region?

RE: Outright refusing to service a console from another region... I'll get my brother in Australia to phone Microsoft about this. See if it's actually possible. I wouldn't be suprised at all if they refuse.

[Rombie]

It's worth a shot. I'd mentioned in another topic that I find it difficult in a location such as Europe that the companies can block any technical support should you buy a console in Germany or France and then be in somewhere else in Europe when it breaks down, but the common thread is that they're all PAL machines so it doesn't cause a major issue... but having a NTSC-J based console in a PAL region or vice versa might not be looked upon that way. No harm in asking though.

Be realistic, get your brother to say in the e-mail that a family member is in Japan and was looking at bringing a console back. See what that gets.

[Bosslucky2]

I had a few problems with mine but I had to send it last year and so far it has last since they replace the first one. However I still get unreadable errors on disk and still get freezing but I hear the new one doesn't have these issues.

[Rombie]

AHAHAHA... one of my friends X360's RROD'ed on Christmas Eve. He was really gutted because he knew he had games coming to him as presents.

[Umon Daisuke]

I don't really care now, since I've had good luck with almost every console (sans the DC), so I'm getting another one tomorrow since I'll save on taxes.

Oddly enough, I had a 2nd firware related anomaly with the PS3 today. The controller turned it on and locked up immediately, then the system was definitely on but without any signal output (audio or video). A manual reset took care of that.

[Rombie]

I've had that happen to me once, since the latest system update. I wouldn't be surprised if it's related.