p2p news / p2pnet: It’s not turnng out to be such a happy Christmas season for Bill and the Boyz with their XBox 360.

First came the crashes: "While not representative (for the simple reason that people who have problems are more likely to vote/post/shout than people who don’t have problems)," a poll on the Xbox-Scene. teamxbox forums suggested, "~15% of the Xbox 360 owners have problems (on +400 total votes). The real % is probably lower, but it’s hard to say how many exactly atm."

Next came news of a class action. Robert Byers, who brought the suit, "said the power supply and central processing unit in the Xbox 360 overheat, affecting heat-sensitive chips and causing the console to lock up." The lawsuit was asking for unspecified damages and litigation-related expenses, as well as the replacement or recall of Xbox 360 game consoles.

Game disc scratches were next up, although people with enough confidence for hands-on could add a, "foam rubber pad on the opposite side of the laser to "prevent the damage that would otherwise occur," said the Llama team.

Then the PI team reported it had penetrated the Xbox 360’s DVD file system.

And now the new, much vaunted King Kong game isn’t what it was cracked up to be because the developers opted for the wrong TV format, says the BBC, quoting Yves Guillemot who runs Ubisoft, the French company that made it.

In fact, "Fans wanting to get the best out of the King Kong video game should avoid the version for Microsoft’s new Xbox 360, the game’s maker Ubisoft has suggested," says the Beeb, going on, "Guillemot admitted that the 360 game is too dark on standard TVs, making it hard to play".

The story has Guillemot saying players will have expected, at the very least, "that Skull Island would look better than on other consoles, taking advantage of the better graphical and processing abilities of the 360". But Ubisoft has warned that the opposite may be the case. ‘We have a problem on the 360,’ said Mr Guillemot. ‘The screen is dark on some TVs and it totally changes the experience. When it’s dark, you don’t see where you have to go’."

The team who made the game used certain settings on high-definition TV screens but, "It did not occur to them that there would be a problem with standard televisions, which are what most people use to play console games."

Tired of being treated like a criminal? They depend on you, not the other way around. Don’t buy their ‘product’. Do bug your local political representatives. Use emails, snail-mail, phone calls, faxes, IM, stop them in the street, blog. And if you’re into organizing, organize petitions, organize demonstrations and then turn up on your local political rep’s doorstep, making sure you’ve contacted your local tv/radio station/newspaper in advance.

Also read:-
crashes - XBox 360: crash reports, November 24, 2005
class action - First XBox 360 class action, DSecember 5, 2005
disc scratches - Xbox360 disc scratching widespread?, November 27, 2005
Llama team - Refurbishing the Xbox 360 DVD Drive, December
penetrated - XBox 360 DVD code hacked, December 13, 2005
BBC - TV glitch mars Xbox 360 Kong game, December 14, 2005

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 15th, 2005 at 10:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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