Why the XBOX 360 Is The Worst Console… Ever!

By Nick Dourian on Wednesday, April 4th, 2012

Yes. You read that title correctly. The XBOX 360 is INDEED the worst console to ever grace the wide world of gaming. I don’t care what you say. I don’t care what random stats you manage to pull out from your bag of Microsoft themed propaganda. I don’t care if you get into a rabid fanboy fit, spewing foaming words of hate that melt right through the computer screen. I. DON’T. CARE. Microsoft’s XBOX 360 is the worst console ever for one very fundamental and highly recognized reason… it’s an overheating, disc scratching, red ringing, short warranty having hardware nightmare, and we fans have been forced to pay the price.

I’ve owned two XBOX 360’s in my life. The first I bought as a response to the release of Modern Warfare, which was just too damn awesome to pass up. Since all of my friends owned 360s, and since I only bought MW so I could play online with them in a single murderous clan of s*** talkers, I opted for Microsoft’s notoriously fickle console. At the time, it was pretty common knowledge that the huge white box had some issues. Ask any techie who had an ounce of common sense, and he’d tell you that the 360 was an inferior system (and no! a loud, obnoxious, blindly faithful console fanboy doesn’t count!). Tons of units would overheat, causing the oh so familiar RED RING OF DEATH! And then, of course, there was the destruction of many a’ game disk. You know how Microsoft loves to advertise the 360 in its vertical position? “Ooooh, look! It can play games standing up!”. Well, you actually can’t do that, not without risking the life of your $60 game disks.

Apparently, if you sit your XBOX up on its side, the disc tray will chew your precious game until it’s nothing more than a scratched up shell of its former self. The first time I heard the terrible creaks and whines come from my game, I rushed to set it on its side. But wait! You can’t touch your system when it’s on! That’ll just further the destruction of your disc, and possibly wreak havoc on the console itself (like it did to mine).

So, after one quickly destroyed copy of Modern Warfare, and a nerve wracking trip to the local “Gaming Guru” to get help sending my freshly broken system into Microsoft, I jumped right on XBOX Live to continue my murderous tirades… but only ever during the breaks between my university classes, of course.

Fast forward 5 years and one conveniently expired warranty later… my replaced system has officially kicked the bucket. I woke up one fine morning (alright, it was 3 in the afternoon… but I was hungover!) picked up my rage scarred controller, and threw on some Marvel vs Capcom 3. Suddenly… RED RING OF DEATH! I contacted Microsoft support again, which, if you’ve done in the past year or two, is such a ridiculous hassle. I have no doubt in my mind that they purposely made their customer support system shamelessly convoluted just to chase off people who don’t have the time to spend an hour figuring it out. Which is a damn fine scam in itself, considering that the cost of customer support is figured into retail costs! It’s a conspiracy, I tell ya’!
But… back to my story. So, I contacted Microsoft and they let me know that my warranty had expired, like I said before. No amount of explaining or begging could change that fact, even after forcing my way to their Level 3 “escalation”.

So, after 5 years of amassing a shrine of XBOX games and murdered controllers (I can’t handle defeat!), I was kicked to the curb like some chump. The sad part is that my story isn’t original. This has happened to an insane amount of gamers all over the world. And like a bruised and battered puppy crawling back to his master, we run to our local GameStop to pick up another XBOX. And we think “Don’t judge us! All of our friends have XBOX 360s, so what else are we supposed to do?”

Well, I for one have decide NOT to buy anymore XBOX products. Even though the majority of my friends play on Live, I simply can’t finance a corporation that treats its long time customers with so much disrespect. And before you try to rationalize Microsoft’s stance on the matter… just stop. I have an N64, a Gamecube, an original XBOX, and a Wii, and none of them have crapped out yet. Hell, they’ve survived moving from house to house, being tossed into boxes, dangerously high tumbles from the table… you name it, and they’ve survived it (but be rational, people!)

I know some of you might say, “But the 360 has a ton of complicated, advanced parts, and that’s why it’s timid”. That’s a blatant lie! Of course modern technology will be more advanced than its predecessors, but that doesn’t mean that it has a right to be unreliable. Microsoft just tried to cut corners and save money, and the result was a pretty terrible system. The only saving grace for the 360 is its rich online environment which is populated by literally millions of gamers. That means if you buy a game, even a relatively unpopular one, then you’re almost guaranteed to find people to play with. But… that doesn’t outweigh the downside, which is that the system is a steaming pile of hot mess.