Will Rogers is widely remembered today for his assertion that he never met a man he didn’t like. From this blanket of quaint, homespun naivety we can safely unravel two revealing threads about good ol’ Will; first, he was generous in his assessment of his fellow man, which probably indicates that he was kind-hearted, trustworthy, and an all-around good guy himself.
Second; he obviously never worked retail over the holidays, otherwise his most frequently recalled quote would have been something along the lines of “people are dicks, may they all burn.” After all, there’s nothing quite like a daily jostle with the fanatical Wii-seeking public to obliterate your faith in peace, joy, and kittens, so it’s probably just as well that the original Mr. Rogers never manned the counter at Large Specialty Gaming Chain during his eclectic career. I almost wish he had; how often do you see the headline “folksy humorist immolates sixteen with rudimentary butane flamethrower” splashed above the fold on the front page? Mmm, crunchy idiots…
One of the things Will Rogers would have certainly found amusing in his hypothetical interactions with the great unwashed — and believe me, a less hyperbolic description you will never find — is their stupefying inability to receive, process, and retain any amount of information delivered via the spoken word. The more information to be presented, the greater the chasm, and therefore the leap, between ignorance and education, between frustration and instruction, or, if you prefer, between finding out what you want, buying it, and getting the hell out of Will’s store and taking your snot-nosed, window-smearing, dimwitted drooling brood with you.
So a hearty thank-you-sir and a swift knee to the Niagaras goes out to Microsoft and their nefarious electronic offspring, the Xbox 360, which not only comes in three radically different, consumer-befuddling crowd-pleasing retail configurations, but it’s also very possible that whichever package you choose won’t outlast your current carton of Marlboros. A hard drive, play-and-charge kit, headset, wireless controller, pack-in games, memory card, HDMI cable — all of these things are very nice, but even the limited-edition Halo Xbox 360 failed to include that most pragmatic of Microsoft accessories, the return shipping box.
The Halo 360 shipping box could have been an attractive shade of olive green with bright orange accents on the address label and the corrugated seams, but (of course), no packing material. The Elite shipping box might have included some pricey, unnecessary twine, maybe in the form of halon-injected, lead-shielded, gold-tipped, all-black Monster cables, and the Premium would have had a nice chrome box flap and maybe some wider tape. The Arcade 360, keeping with its minimalist theme (and Microsoft’s ham-fisted attempts to woo the Japanese market), would simply include directions on how to fashion your own shipping box using the instruction booklets for Blue Dragon, Enchanted Arms, and Lost Odyssey.
There are a lot of numbers out there claiming to report the 360’s failure rate, but the only ones that I can credibly relate are the ones pertaining to my own experience; I’ve owned four 360s in the 981 days since the system’s release. Three of those have failed; of the three, two were out-of-warranty, as both shuffled off before the new three-year replacement policy took effect. Two lasted a year, the third made it for six months. The latter was promptly replaced by Microsoft with a refurbished unit that has troubles of its own, but which seems to be holding on. So far.
Compare these admittedly esoteric statistics against the fact that I still possess my original, fully functional, new-out-of-the-box Super Nintendo, N64, GameCube, Playstation, PS2, and a six-year-old refurbished Dreamcast, and it won’t take long to spot the quality assurance gremlin afoot in the halls of Microsoft’s R&D. Not only is this intractable beast capering roughshod over the collective buzz of 19 million Xbox devotees, it serves an insidious master whose name, as we have always know it, is Profit.
As it should be, Microsoft is in the game industry to make money. It’s not a case of charity, a beneficent entertainment trust set up to provide those possessing little ambition and fewer prospects with a sustainable hobby; it’s a business, and in order for it to remain a business, it must be profitable. Those who find the pursuit of profit distasteful have never truly earned anything on their own.
That said, the Xbox 360 is the worst piece of consumer electronics that I’ve ever used.
Come and see the violence inherent in the system. Help! Help! I'm being repressed!
Any other company selling any other product with such abysmal reliability would have folded like an origami wallet two years ago, but because of Microsoft’s Mariana-deep pockets, the 360 survives — and thrives — in spite of itself. Part of this is due to Microsoft’s class-action-averting policy of providing a three-year warranty on all new 360s sold since mid-2007, but this changes nothing with my first two systems, nor does it help thousands of others who’ve watched $300-$400 disappear in an out-of-warranty, red-ringed puff of smoke after a year or less of reasonable operation. (And by reasonable I mean: kept in an unobstructed, well-ventilated area, never left on when not in use, and played for an average of fewer than two hours per day.)
The 360 sports the widest selection of software for its generation — even if we include Nintendo’s new policy of allowing anyone with a thready pulse to develop a Wii game as long as it includes Wii Remote functionality — but what good is a diverse library of games if your six-month-old system is consistently in transit, or worse, a $400 paperweight? Does an impressive array of titles mitigate the 360’s substandard durability? The short answer is no. By itself, the 360’s library isn’t enough to airlift the hardware to Profit General, but when considered alongside other factors, it becomes clear why Microsoft hasn’t pulled the plug and sunk all of the money it loses on the 360 into building daycare centers and puppy hospitals.
So what keeps Xbox owners like myself, those of us who’ve been burned twice and singed once, coming back for more? What keeps us lining up to be smacked in the ‘nads by something which, by all rights, should have died an ignominious death shortly after its release? The long, convoluted answer, as always, is content.
With the 360, games aren’t the whole picture. What Microsoft did with the original Xbox was to create a cohesive community in Xbox Live, but with the 360 they offer a much more customizable, player-driven experience; Gamertags and Gamerscores give the user a personal, irreplaceable stake in the system, touching on satisfying core gaming mechanics such as collection, customization, and feedback to keep us returning again and again to the diner o’ dysfunction for yet another heaping plate of abuse. Most have too much invested, financially and emotionally, to simply walk away. So we don’t.
And therein lies the reason why the underlying issue of quality has yet to be rectified by the Redmond Raiders; those of us with more disposable income than sense refuse to relinquish an attachment to something which has nipped us in the goobers not once, not twice, but for me, three times. So we continue to buy games, and pay Xbox Live subscriptions, because ultimately, the means justify the end; the 360’s content cannot be found anywhere else. And that’s worth a busload of Microsoft Points.
Generally, the 360’s game library is shit, but that’s a problem endemic to gaming itself, not just the 360. With all-too-rare exceptions, such as 2k’s BioShock and Bethesda’s Oblivion, the 360’s gaming palette is a forgettable morass of soot and poo, comprised mainly of testosterone-fueled, latently homoerotic shooters designed to appeal to anyone who must first borrow a brain cell in order to break one in half. Roger Ebert might be a boob, but even a broken boob is right twice a day.
The Xbox 360 succeeds in spite of itself. Its content, though largely puerile, simply cannot be matched by any other console or even the PC; the collection of achievements, which leads to the broader accumulation of the Gamerscore, coupled with the exchange of social play and the Xbox Live Marketplace, and the customization of the Gamertag and Gamerpics, strike so many fundamentally satisfying chords that the systems themselves could have a shelf life comparable to that of the average loaf of pumpernickel, and we’d still fork over the cash to play.
Like the Wii, the 360 treads perilously close to the notion that the value of an experience lies not in its content, but in its context. Unlike Nintendo, however, Microsoft realizes that such value must emerge intrinsically from the games, instead of extrinsically from the hardware; they’ve formulated a seamless blend of content-based context to create an appealing experience which is somehow much greater than the sum of its parts.
Will Rogers also offered a lesser-known quote; “let advertisers spend the same amount of money improving their product that they do on advertising and they wouldn’t have to advertise it.” To most of us, this would make perfect sense.
But to a company that never met a dollar it didn’t like, it’d just be bad business.
Tags: 360, Crunchy, Ebert, Idiot, Microsoft, Nintendo, Rogers, Soot
