With most of my friends experiencing Red Rings of Death, hard drive failure, E74 errors, or a combination of bad mojo multiple times, I suppose it was only a matter of time before my Xbox 360 Elite died some horrible Microsoft "quality" death. I was minding my own business, playing Firefight mode in Halo 3: ODST with my friends Ian and Paul when vertical white lines of graphical corruption began dancing on my screen. I could still play, but I couldn't really see anything that was going on. Thinking maybe it was something with the game itself, one of my friends tried killing me. That did nothing, so I exited to the dashboard and saw that every option had deathly black vertical lines running through them and a faint double image. I powered off my Xbox 360, powered it back on and was slapped in the face with the E74 error. Awesome. Now I'll be without my 360 for however long it takes for it to get fixed. At least I have my reliable PS3 to get my now-gen gaming fix.

This kind of shit never happened on old-generation consoles; They just worked.

- Shawn - 10/17/09