Microsoft Announces New 360 Bundle Packs 103
Starting at the end of this month, you'll be able to get a little more for your dollar when buying a new Xbox 360. Gamasutra is reporting that Micrsoft has unveiled bundle pack versions of the Elite and standard consoles. The $449.99 Xbox 360 Elite and the standard $349.99 Xbox will now both come with packed-in game titles: Forza Motorsport 2 and Marvel Ultimate Alliance. "Microsoft says both bundles will be available by the end of October and throughout the holidays. The retail packaging bears the company's new model-specific slogans, with the Elite tagged 'Go Big', and the standard 'Go Pro'. On October 3rd, various now-deleted online retail listings showed the existence of a third pack, the $279.99 'Arcade' bundle, which bore all similar markings as the new models, and was tagged 'Go Play' ... As yet, Microsoft has not officially announced the bundle, but all signs point to its imminent arrival."
Re:Did they fix their console yet? (Score:2, Informative)
It depends on when you bought your console, and when it failed.
- There was a bad batch of power supplies with the launch consoles, which is most likely what caused your brother's to fail. In those cases they should've just sent along a new power supply, though it wouldn't surprise me if they just did a straight console replacement instead.
- More consoles suffered from heat-related issues, especially with the GPU. Over a fair amount of time and use, the console would get hot enough and cycle enough that the solder holding down the GPU (or sometimes the memory chips) would lift. The infamous towel trick works on such consoles, because intentionally overheating the console may cause the solder joints to expand enough to make a connection. This problem was addressed earlier this summer with a more efficient heatsink for the GPU, and when coupled with the new 65nm process CPUs (GPUs are still 90nm) overheating leading to solder lift should be a thing of the past.
- There has been some amount of "random" failures. For example, when my first console died from the GPU solder lift fault, it was replaced with a unit that had a bad DVD drive. After about a week with the new console after replacement, the DVD drive simply refused to spin disks (insert a disk, notice the orientation, close the drive, get an error that the console can't read the disk, open the tray and notice that the orientation of the disk has not changed). That was just a fluke, and truly falls into the standard ~1-3% acceptable failure rate for consumer electronics.
- Finally, there's been plenty of user error pawned off as system faults. For example, the notorious DVD-eating nature of the Xbox 360 is due in most part to idiots tilting the console while a disk is spinning. Yes, I know it's fun to watch the ring of light re-orient itself on the fly, but is it worth risking the wrath of physics of a spinning disk?
With price cuts, 65nm CPUs, and updated GPU heatsinks in consoles for sale now, the Xbox 360 has never been a better buy. When you include the 3-year warranty for Red Ring of Death issues (any failure that would cause a "three red lights" error, which would not include DVD-ROM failure), I wouldn't worry at all about buying a 360 right now. It's those of us who purchased at launch time that got screwed (I'm on my 2nd replacement console, and bought a backup Core system so that I could play Forza 2 at launch while my main console was in the process of being replaced the second time).Re:HALO 3 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:HALO 3 (Score:3, Informative)