Over the course of last year, the amount of games and the time I played that console grew larger and larger and now it’s definitely the most played console in my house. At least, until three minutes past five yesterday. After spending the last few days achievement hunting together with my brother we managed to unlock the infamous red ring of death.

Before that, I was hoping (but never fully confident) that my Xbox would be devoid of any problems. Sadly, I was wrong and it seems that the buzz around the failure rate of Microsoft’s console is not entirely unjustified.

The good news is that I can send it back to Microsoft for repairs for free. The bad news is that repairs will take two to three weeks and I’ll be damned if my two days old copy of GH5 has to gather dust for all that time.

So this afternoon, my brother will pickup a new Xbox and we will just transfer the HD from the broken one as it has to be removed before sending it anyway. In the end this means that we will have two Xboxes but that’s not a problem. We’ll just put one at my parents house and use that for backup in case the new one decides to bail out too.

And the good stuff doesn’t stop there because they also released this awesome music video! Always a sucker for these upbeat dance tracks I really dig it and somehow find the slow-mo editing (or whatever they call that) strangely exciting. By the way, this effect looks especially great on the background layer with Tinkerballa (Amy Okuda) who is mesmerizing even when she is not dancing so hot.

First, the guitar. After playing maybe a total of four or five hours, the day after the game arrived, the strum button started making this horrible and annoying squeaking sound. Sometimes it seems to quiet down only to get really annoying again half a minute later. It is still usuable but I have to turn up the volume of my sound system pretty high in order to not get distracted by the squeaking. It is worst when alternate strumming which is unfortunate because I really drove myself to perfect the technique whilst playing GH3.

Next up is the drum kit. After reading about (but luckely not encountering) the problems with the RB drum kit I had pretty high expectations of the GHWT drum kit. Turns out these where misplaced. It looks and feels great (especially the sound and bounce on the pads) and works beautifully with Rock Band. However, after exactly one week, during “The Hand that Feeds” (on RB, using the GHWT kit) the green drum pad stopped working completely. At first I thought it might be just a temporary glitch so I tried with the GHWT disc but (not surprisingly) the green pad still wasn’t working. 

So now I am not happy at all (and that is putting it mildly). The guitar controller is so annyoing it is almost unplayable and the drum kit is so broken that it is unplayable. But not only that, I also loose a good deal of my spare time dealing with support and sending the stuff back. This is what annoys me the most of all because that should’ve been time playing the game.

Ah well, fortunately though the Rock Band instruments are still working perfectly (even the flimsy kick pedal is still going strong) which is admittely not something that I expected a while ago when I first started playing. Now I can only hope for the same kind of luck with the Rock Band 2 controllers – if that game ever arrives in Europe that is.