For some time now I’ve felt excluded from the rest of the gaming community, somehow I just wasn’t part of the club. The internet was filled with discussions and forums that I could not participate in. I was on the outside.

Why? Because my XBox 360 worked fine. Yesterday finally I could be like the rest of the cool kids and own a broken XBox 360, yup my 360 has finally got the dreaded RROD (Red Ring of Death). For those of you that don’t know the 360 was made on the cheap by Microsoft out of bits of old Russian submarines and chips salvaged from Sinclair ZX81s which means they are notorious for breaking down. When they do you get 3 red lights on the front of the console, this Wikipedia article does a better job of explaining it all than I can.

Microsoft got a right royal pounding in the press and on all fronts on this matter and in response have extended the warrenty on any 360 to 3 years, which covers even launch models.

So do I get it fixed? do I upgrade? Well both probably. The newer 360s have HDMI output, much quieter DVD drives and 120Gb HDD so all of that is pretty tempting. That means I’ll probably pick up an Elite, transfer over my stuff and then send the busted one off for repair then flog it.

But what a pain, and I was only switching the 360 on to cancel my Live Gold subscription!