“Open Source Media” is “Pajamas Media” once again.
I’m glad to hear it. No more acronym confusion for me. Yay!
Now, if only my X-box 360 would work, I’d be happy.
My birth parents’ last name, obviously, was Parker*.
I got my X-box 360 (I know, officially, there’s no hyphen, but it looks stupid written “Xbox 360″, and I refuse to do it). I also have two extra controllers and two games, Perfect Dark Zero, and Project Gotham Racing. There’s just one problem.
It won’t recognize discs.
Or, rather, it will recognize them, then decides that it doesn’t anymore. Single player seems to work okay (most of the time) on both Perfect Dark Zero and Project Gotham Racing, but multiplayer on both of them is screwed. I can’t do PGR3 multiplayer at all (as soon as I try, a warning about an “unrecognized disk” pops up). PDZ deathmatch and dark ops work sometimes, but sometimes they don’t. PDZ co-op worked through the first level, but as soon as the second level loads, it says the disc can’t be read.
The error message tells me to check the disc & console regions, clean the disc with a soft cloth, and restart the console. None of that helped. I called Microsoft, and they said that, as unlikely as it seemed, it sounded like I had two bad discs. I thought that was preposterous, but since there’s no shortage of the games, I decided to hope they were right, and exchanged my games for new ones. PDZ still doesn’t work. Haven’t tried the new PGR3, but I can’t imagine it will magically work, since three disks have done the same thing now.
I’m on hold now, hoping the problem’s popped up elsewhere and they can tell me to go download a patch somewhere, slap it onto my Xbox over the network, and magically make it work. I doubt it’ll happen, but I can hope, right?
If anyone’s interested (or using Google to search), here is the exact error message:
This disc is unreadable. It may be the wrong region for this console.
- Match the region of the disc to the console
- Clean the disc with a soft cloth
- Restart the console
For more help, go to www.xbox.com/support.
For the record, this isn’t making me go back on what I said about liking Microsoft yesterday, but if their support staff acts as incompetent as earlier, it very well may. I don’t mind if they tell me that the console is bad, or if they tell me that they’ve been having a lot of these issues, or whatever. I just want them to treat me with a little bit of basic respect (that is, not blame the problem on the games) and be fairly honest. “We know, a lot of people are having this issue, and we’re working on it” will go a lot farther to calm this customer than, “Well, I don’t know… maybe try another console.”
[UPDATE - 17:18 - Still on hold. Desperately wishing that someone at Microsoft (namely, whoever picks out hold music) will suddenly find some taste.]
[UPDATE II - 17:23 - No longer on hold, but support doesn't seem to be very helpful so far. A friend says that he's seen reports of those two games causing problems in a few other places. Almost makes me wish I had the money to go get Condemned and try it out. I'm trying to see if he has any links. ]
[UPDATE III - 17:41 - Well, they're sending me a box so I can send it in to get repairs. Ordinarily, I'd think that was a unnecessary waste of time for a $400 piece of hardware (since it's so much easier to simply take it to the store and replace it), but since replacing it seems like it'll take even longer than having it repaired, I'm playing along.]
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* If you don’t get the reference, think Spider-Man, who has such horrible luck that it’s almost legendary. I think (though, honestly, I’m not certain) that he’s referred to it as “the old Parker luck” a few times.