It has arrived! (a few months ago...)

Well, my diligence paid off, and my free Xbox 360 finally arrived! As I suspected, it's an older model, and does not feature an HDMI port, but I'm not going to complain. After all, it was free. I have also received the free extra controller I ordered. I'm starting to amass gaming paraphernalia that I have no place for. To solve this problem, I've decided to custom build a shelf that will compactly store all of my PS3 & Xbox 360 games and controllers and stuff. After the Xbox came in, I went and bought Guitar Hero: World Tour, so all told I have 2 PS3 controllers, 2 Xbox controllers, a guitar, a drum set, a microphone, an Xbox Live headset, and some games.

Once the shelf is built, it will have three towers to hold PS3 games, Xbox games/DVD cases, and Blu-ray cases. The only reason I've split up the PS3 games and the blu-ray discs, which are roughly the same size, is that I want my cubby holes along the bottom of the shelf to be three across and two down. That way I have a column for PS3, a column for Xbox, and the third column that holds Blu-rays and accessories. My current plans will have the shelf frame held together with wooden dowels and the internal shelves held by interlocking them. Here's a Google Sketchup mockup of what it will (hopefully) eventually look like.

At this point, all I have done is one sawhorse, but it's a start.

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OK, so it's months later and I still don't have the shelf built, but the Xbox is still going strong(ish). It did, however, mutilate my Halo 3 game disc beyond repair. It did this without me moving or even touching it at all. Thankfully I had only paid $20 for the game on eBay, and I was able to find another copy for about the same price. So while overall I have paid the current retail price for the game, I've received 2 game discs out of it. Whatever. Anyway, before I let the Microsoft Monster devour any games I paid full price for, I looked online to check out if anyone else had come across this little "feature."

Turns out it's quite common. So common, in fact, that Microsoft instituted a game disc replacement policy, for the nominal fee of $20. I call bullshit on that one, and I would never pay Microsoft to fix something that their product broke through no fault of my own. Well rather than taking my chances with other discs, I did some research and found out that it's caused by the way the DVD drive in the Xbox is manufactured. There's enough overhead room that the disc can actually tilt far enough for it to scrape against the laser apparatus. Total fail.

Good thing for me (and many others) that Llamma has dealt with this issue and come up with a relatively painless fix, if you don't mind voiding your warranty, that is. So I paid the $10 for the little pads they sell, completely dismantled the Xbox, took apart the DVD drive, stuck these little pads on, and voila! I can't scratch a disc even if I try, and I have. I can't even make it skip.

While I'm happy this worked, I must say I'm not terribly impressed with the workmanship of the (admittedly early-model) Xbox 360. So since I've voided the warranty with reckless abandon, I may think about modding it some. And speaking of voiding warranties, I might also void my hard drive and do a little self-upgrading from the stock 20GB drive to a big, fancy 120GB-er. Another project for another post.