This is absolutely ridiculous. I was just playing GTA IV on my 360, and I'm pretty sure it's dying. Out of nowhere, the console stopped rendering things properly, and my once beautiful Liberty City was now covered in odd purples, reds and greens. Otherwise known as the telltale sign that your GPU has died, is dying, or is overheating... which it shouldn't be in a console, unless it's dying.

I rebooted, and this time, all visuals failed to render completely, my screen was nothing but purple and black. After a third reboot, it again displayed my dashboard, but it was back to a mess of purple and green.

So, at this point, I'm pissed, dissapointed, and terrified. I'm terrified because the console is out of its warranty period, and since there was no red ring of death, that probably means I'll have to pay the service charge to get it replaced, which is in the hundreds of dollars. I'm pissed, because this will be my third Xbox 360, after the first one died on the day I got it. But mostly, I'm dissapointed. Not because my console broke, or that I'll be without it for a few weeks while it gets replaced, but because at the end of this quarter, I and three of my friends were planning to hold a Rock Band concert in the middle of EWU's campus for an entire day, taking paid requests from students, the proceeds of which would have gone to Penny Arcade's Child's Play Charity. (For those of you who don't know what that is, click here [link] )And, without a console to play the game on, either to hold the event or practice for it, we're pretty much fucked.

So congratulations Microsoft. Not only is your abysmal hardware record an insult and a pain in the ass to everyone who bothered to buy your console, you also managed to accidentally screw a charity out of an entire fundraiser.

Oh, and coincidently, I'm putting in a request tomorrow for my fifth Fender guitar for Rock Band, since the first four have all suffered from faulty strum bars, whammy bars and overdrive activation problems, respectively.

Why the fuck can't anyone make working hardware anymore?