In Response To: From One of Those Stores' Employees... (Stevedroid)
: I work at a certain video game retail store (which I can't mention due to the
: unlikely chance that someone working for the company could read this
: post...and then fire me) and we got our X Box demo unit about two weeks
: ago. I was actually a big X-Box supporter, being a PC buff and knowing
: that Microsoft does indeed know some things about games and peripherals,
: and also sharing a love for all things nVidia, I thought the console
: looked quite good.
: At first I was a bit un-impressed with the demo disc. It consists of a bunch
: of gameplay movies and one very short and very boring interactive demo of
: Munch's Oddysee. The movies were nice, but they were just movies. As far
: as the Munch demo, the graphics were good but not that amazing and the
: demo took nearly 30 secs to a minute to load and it's a very, very small
: level with not much going on. However, I kept my faith in the console, I
: told myself it was would have some great games and the loading time was
: probably due to bad writing of the demo disc.
: Unfortunately, after loading the first retail X-Box game we got in, Fusion
: Frenzy, the system is now kaput. Broken after two weeks of not very hard
: use the system fails to boot at all, no matter what game (or lack there
: of) is placed in the disc reader. I thought perhaps the game had some
: strange virus in it, but now similar reports have come in from other
: stores from our comapny in our area and they never loaded anything on the
: unit other than the original demo disc. Microsoft says that very few
: consoles are failing, about 1 in 100. Seeing some preliminary stats for
: our company I can say that the number is actually much closer to 3 in 10,
: getting worse and worse every day, we may soon have a nearly 50% failure
: rate.
: I'd like to believe it's just the demo units, but they're the same units from
: the first retail production run. I'd like to believe it was human error in
: how they were hooked up, but truth is that it was easy to hook up and if
: it was installed incorrectly wouldn't it fail to work right away? I'd like
: to believe our unit was used hard or beat up, but those X-Box demo units
: are like tanks compared to the demo units of the other consoles, you can't
: even get within 6 inches of the console itself...magnet theory doesn't
: work.
: I'm not a Microsoft hater, in fact I'm quite happy with the company and I
: absolutely love WinXP. Sadly though, I'm canceling my pre-order of the
: X-Box, I believe the hardware is simply faulty. They took complex PC
: components and congealed them into something defintely non-PC, a hard
: coded console that can't be fixed and can't be trouble-shooted by the
: user.
: I'll spend my $300 on a GeForce 3 card and hope that RTCW and Duke4 will hold
: me over until Halo is PC-released.
I have no reason to *not* believe you, since your post is very cool and rational throughout, but did you happen to see this post in this very long thread:
http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl?read=74332
Granted you state that you tried several different discs, but I wonder if it might still be explainable from a potential bad bit of software code on the demo disc. Maybe the graphics library gets loaded from demo disc and is simply cached until a newer version is found on another disc. Since they would all have the same version, the 'good' copy of the library is never loaded from one of the other discs. This is just my software testing brain kicking in here. Excuse my rambling....
I myself have played Halo on what I considered to be as-close-to-final hardware as possible just 2 months ago or so. These consoles were running the entire day, stacked on top of each other, being batted around. I certainly didn't see any kind of errors that took the whole machine down permanently. Regular beta crashes, easily fixed by hitting the reset button.
Ah well, time will tell for sure...
- M/F
| 
