Sordid: Our Affair with the Xbox 360 (Part IV)
Play. It’s a simple concept, one that conjures up happy images in anyones mind that can range from a memorable round of four-square on the playground to an exhilarating bout in Call of Duty 4. In our case, the concept of finally playing on our Xbox 360 is one that’s much harder to force into reality. We’ve come a long ways in just a few weeks from having returned a defective factory-sealed Xbox for an Elite in place of my original, to the horrible mistake that was the 512mb Memory Unit to finally sending away for a Data Migration Kit.
The kit arrived last week, and then the one that Maxx vowed to send us arrived, and oddly enough, a third one arrived from Microsoft. Anyone need a kit of their own? As I’m sure you can tell from the image above, all did not go well with the transfer. I’m not sure what was corrupted or left behind (since the process formats the original drive) but I can tell you what does and doesn’t work.
As expected, the new drive is much faster than the old one. Our game library loads up near-instantaneously and the Guide zips onto the screen with no lag at all. I swear, and this may just be wishful thinking, that Grand Theft Auto IV runs faster too. But I’d trade all that to have access to our Xbox Live Arcade games. Thanks to the way the games are signed to the hardware they’re first downloaded onto we’ve each lost the ability to play games that the other purchased (or punched in a code for).
I can no longer play Carcassonne, Robotron, Uno, or a handful of other games and Shang Xiang can’t access the myriad of games I’ve purchased. The process of deleting and then redownloading the games didn’t sort things out either. We may have purchased them as a couple but Microsoft has segregated us in the name of DRM. The only solution (solution = punishment) I can see is to purchase the games all over again. I’ve contacted customer support in hopes that they’ll fix everything, but it’s just a pipe dream; the infantile hope that if I believe strongly enough in something – no matter how impossible it may seem – that it must come true.
And so Sordid continues. Yes, I’m glad to be off of that worrisome 20gb drive with all our game saves intact but I’m also crushed at not being able to play some of my favorite go-to games like Carcassonne and Feeding Frenzy. I’ll give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and let things go for a week while I wait for a response and then I’ll finally wrap up this lingering feature of sadness.
