The Console Wars: Ring of disc death (Xbox 360 annoyance #008) | Xbox 360, Playstation 3 PS3, Revolution

Wednesday, December 07, 2005

Ring of disc death (Xbox 360 annoyance #008)

"Since our first experience with the Xbox 360 disc-scratching issue, numerous anecdotal reports from around the game-o-sphere have given us a better feel for the conditions under which the issue occurs. This is a wrap-up of those issues and of the annoyance:

vertical orientation alone does not scratch DVDs
horizontal orientation alone does not scratch DVDs
movement of the Xbox 360 during play scratches DVDs

movement could be someone running through the house and sending shocks to the system through your floorboards
movement is often done on purpose when friends try to show friends the cool way in which the ring of light reorients itself with its fancy mercury switch
movement is often accidental, as when annoying controller cables are tripped over in the dark, jarring the Xbox 360
sometimes, people just get sick of poorly designed boss fights, and kick their Xbox 360s in frustration
and sometimes, customers are committing fraud by purposefully destroying games that have been played to completion so that they can be exchanged for store credit that is used to purchase new games

This annoyance falls into the ”so annoying we want to kick the family pet” category. I have moved various home electronics devices while they were spinning DVDs and audio CDs and not once have I hosed a media disc so thoroughly. I regularly move my laptop while its hard disk and DVD drives are spinning, and no damage has occurred yet. Sure, a console is meant to be stationary, but if fault tolerance is the norm amongst home consumer electronics devices, it should be the norm for the Xbox 360 as well because customers have come to expect that base level of fault tolerance." [more]

¶ D.Vader // 12/07/2005 11:40:00 AM // PermaLink