Red Ring of Death: Part 1

Well it finally happened; my 360 RRODed.

I had read numerous reports of other people's 360's RRODing but I figured those were caused largely by a lack of ventilation or poor air quality conditions, so I would be in the clear as my machine stands alone with at least eight inches of freespace around it. The air in my office is pretty clear as well.

Not so, however. Over the course of the past two days, the machine had locked up a couple times. It came back to life after the first reboot, but on the subsequent try, I was met only with the baleful cyclopean crimson gaze of my 360.

I'm tempted to pick up one of those fancy black 360's with HDMI, but unless I am mistaken, I believe those have the same old small 10GB harddrive, and I think there's a new hardware rev on the way. Fortunately, Microsoft has fessed up to the hardware defects in the original models and extended their warranty program for RRODs to three years from purchase. I have registered my busted machine and requested shipping materials. The whole process is going to take roughly a month, so I'll be 360less for a while. Hopefully it returns to me before Dark Sector lands. (Yes, I am looking forward to Dark Sector!)

So for now I guess I will be PS3ing it for a bit.

[UPDATE #1]
I checked the specs of the 360 Elite. It does have a 120 GB HD, not the lowly 10GB, so that's all good. What's not all good is that at least the initial batch of Elites made use of the 90nm process chips, rather than the more efficient, and cooler running 65nm chips. I'll have to do some research to see if the more recent Elites are 65nm. Complicating things however is that I understand that the 45nm are on the way, but might be skipped all together in the 360 for the 32nm chips sometime in '09. Sheesh...

I suppose If I went Elite, I wouldn't be able to stand a mismatched system, so I'd be looking at buying all of the black accessories too: controllers, quick charge packs, headsets, etc. A pricey proposition from the outset, add all the color matched peripherals to the Elite equation and suddenly I'm thinking that waiting a month and a half for my refurb launch 360 is sounding like a good move.

Jericho

I actually played this back in December, but am only getting around to going over it now due to the flood of product that has been released.

For some reason or another I had my eye on this game for a time. I dare say I was mildly anticipating its release. I haven't a clue why. The demo was a mixed bag. Not great, but not totally terrible. While there were parts of it I really did not like, I still was not totally turned off. I am not a Clive Barker fan either. Sure, Hellraiser was good, but everything else I can think of that he's done was pretty shlocky as far as I recall. I don't even like the name of the game. "Jericho." Wasn't that an ancient city in the middle east? Why appropriate that name? Stuff like that irks me.

And so I found myself at the local gamestore. Ace Combat 6 was tempting, but after playing Assassin's Creed, I was in the mood for some more 3rd person character based action. Vampire Rain looked to be of extremely questionable quality, and Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom was not out yet, so I went 1st person. I was trying to pick a game out of the dozen or so mediocre-to-good first person shooters crowding the 360 rack. What to pick? Area 51: Blacksite? At one point I was kind of looking forward to this "B" title as well, but comments from the producer trashing the game scared me off. Call of Duty 4? No way, not after the abomination that Call of Duty 2 was. Soldier of Fortune: Payback? I feared a "rushed-to-market" dev cycle on this one. SOF wasn't really ever known for quality anyway. Mass Effect? Wasn't a fan of Kotor 1 or 2, and got bored with Jade Empire. Bioshock? No real interest in shooting rabid flappers and prohibition era zombies with a rubberband gun. (FWIW, I ended up changing my tune on several of these games later. Quality stuff in that list.)

So it was between Timeshift and Jericho. Generic Sci Fi Shooter with a twist, or Generic Horror Shooter with a twist? I went horror. Though I am not a fan of Clive Barker's storytelling, I do find aspects of his aesthetic interesting, and the environments in the demo looked pretty nice. So despite the fact that I doubted whether it was even worth $40 or not, Jericho it was. The game was $50 to boot, so I avoided that extra "next gen sting" of $10 that Time Shift featured.

I'll jump to the chase: Jericho is a $40 game. A solid C, maybe C+ title. A 75%. I would give it a "2" on my scale. The sad thing is, it could have been better were it not for one thing. One design choice mires down Jericho in the morass of mediocrity: The squad.

I sympathize with the design team. As should be evident by the paragraph above, the shelves are chock full of first person shooters. How does a developer get their title noticed? How does a game attempt to rise above the din? The answer, many would have you believe, is "the twist," or "the hook," or "the X." (BTW: What a lame ass term; "The X.") It's that one feature that a dev team will wager their entire dev cycle on, and maybe even the livelihood of their company on, regardless of how appropriate or fun that feature may or may not be. Happens all the time.

So how did "the squad" ensure that Jericho would be lost in the Christmas Crush? Easy: THE SQUAD NEVER WORKS.

Here's a word of advice: Valve is a great developer. An extremely smart group of people, right? Creators of some of the best games ever, agreed? Well Valve put squad mechanics in Half Life 2. Guess what? It did not work. The squaddies got in the way, blocked passages, walked into fire, chattered repetitively, and so on. So here's my rule of thumb when it comes to development: If Valve can't get it right, give up. Neither will you.

And like many squad games before it, Jericho suffers from all of those aforementioned issues.

The repetitive chatter is especially grevious in Jericho, as the team members are all apparently a bunch of foul mouthed hardcases from broken homes and similar teen angsty inducing conditions that resulted in the assembly of the gothiest group of ragtag misfits the armed services has ever seen! TEN HUT! *yawn*

It is really too bad, because there is some good in Jericho. On those rare occasions that your squad aren't cursing up a storm and being outrageous nusances, the game is kinda fun: run around a bunch of ancient, gloomy ruins and blast the cherry cobbler out of a bunch of nasty, gory monsters. In fact, at first blush, you might think you were looking at a next gen Quake 1, which is not a bad thing at all IMHO. I think that's what attracted me to the title in the first place. If there was anything to be learned from Serious Sam and NOT to be learned from Doom 3, I'd say that a little old school style "fend off the hordes" game play can go a long way.

The weaponry is pretty meaty and satisfying enough, while most of the the special powers are cool and useful. Unfortunately, I've never been a fan of character swapping for whatever reason, so having to switch characters to access the power of weapon I wanted to use was points against.

On the bright side the Achievement Points were pretty easy to max out, so that's always nice in a budget grade title.

While not stellar, ultimately I ended up liking Jericho more than I expected. It's too bad few bad design choices had to pull down the experience. I can't help but think that if they had simplified, the game would have been even more enjoyable.

Score: 2