Never thought I’d see the day. Well, maybe I thought I’d see it but that it wouldn’t be affecting me.

Apparently, this latest fall update patch for the patch patch, firmware update patch, is causing some problems. I have a 360 that was manufactured on the 22nd of October in 2005, and never had any overheating issues, NOTHING until just these last few days when I sat down to play a bit of viva pinata to show the wife.

On saturday I managed to play for 4 hours, with only a few hitches here and there, and since I saw people having the occasional lockup on the forums, I figured perhaps that was just normal for the game, I mean, games are buggy as hell these days, and theres always some patch out for this issue, or that untested bug or whatever.

Well, I turned the system off for about 30 mins, and then powered on again to show the wife some stuff I read, and bam, it hits me, over and over like a machine gun filled with forks. Lockup after lockup every 30 seconds to two minutes. It’s like a barrage of suck and it won’t stop. I figured maybe it was the dog running around causing these minute 360 shattering vibrations in the floor, I had no idea.

Then today I get to do some testing as I was too frustrated last night to think straight. I open the entire 360 up and load up viva again. Now, it’s been a cool 50 to 60 degrees in the great room since the night before, and the 360 has been off, so it’s cool to the touch. Load up, bam, lock. Load again, bam lock. I feel the heatsink. Warm to the touch, not hot.

WTF!

Now I’m getting a bit pissed, so I try small arms…lock…I try gears of war…lock. I try without hard drive…lock. I try every possible thing I can think of, and still the same results. Finally I start thinking about what the patch did, and perhaps its something with a video driver or scaler or something and so I set the dash to 480p. I play 3 rounds of small arms without a lock. I played gears of war for 10  mins with no problems. I played viva for about 15 and then got a lock again. Well, if that ain’t curious, I don’t know what is. Viva I think has it’s issues, but if setting the dash to 480p might help some of this freezing until ms can figure out what the hell they broke this time with their patch for the patch, then I guess I’ll have to keep it this way.

I thought ms was supposed to make gaming more fun, and now we are getting their windows update treatment where every new patch brings new problems. This is getting rediculous beyond words.

A few xbox.com threads for your enjoyment:

http://forums.xbox.com/8561117/ShowPost.aspx

http://forums.xbox.com/8584407/ShowPost.aspx

EDIT- Just an update, I tried closing the 360 back up, and it seems to lock up just as fast in the viva pinata menus… I tried even doing 480i, and some games I get a bit further in, but it’s crazy. If ms doesn’t fix this this week, I dunno if I am going to hold on to my 360. It’s getting that bad to me. It would be one thing if these updates were optional, but to have poorly tested updates be mandatory, they are killing themselves.