Holiday Technology Breakdown Nightmare
Hidee-Ho all, hope you had a great holiday! I had a rather low key one here in SF with some dear friends that I haven't spent a holiday with in almost seven years. It was a wonderful time andI made a gumbo for dinner that took over twenty four hours to make. Long time over the stove, but completely worth it.
Dinner was finally over and we decided to retire to the living room for some Rock Band. A few of the friends over had never played before so anticipation was high. We fired up the 360, put the disc in, entered the code to unlock all the songs (only for the party mind you), picked out our characters and song and then... "This disc is unreadable, please wipe with a soft cloth and restart your system." WHAT? So, I pulled out the disc and looked at it only to discover radial scratches all around the disc where it sits in the 360. So I tried laying the console down on it's side... once again, no luck. I tried five or six more times but nothing worked so we eventually gave up, foiled in our chance to rock!
Now what? The best group game experience around was now unavailable to us. So, my friend Tom whom I'm staying with says "Why don't you set up the Wii in my room and we can play that! (the living room tv doesn't have component hookups). So I cart the Wii into his room, set it up and go to adjust the video settings. in my perusing and button pushing I accidentally set the picture to 480p and suddenly the screen goes blue.. no picture. Ok, well this usually happens when you switch your console to a setting it can't read, but it eventually switches itself back. So I waited. And waited. It never switched back. I had had this problem with my PS3 and you can hold the "ON" button down for five secs and it resets the settings. So I tried that on the Wii, no dice. We turn to the internet to solve our issue... Nothing. Plenty of people with the same iussue but no way to resolve it short of moving the Wii to and HDTV and switching it manually (my HDTV is in storage) or finding the original composite cables and hooking up that way (mine are also in storage).
So needless to say, our precious evening of video game Christmas miracles was ruined and we turned to board games instead, which was just as fun, just in a different way. More than anything I was just glad to be with my friends on the holiday. But, today I head to Best Buy to purchase another copy of Rock Band, hopefully since it's so early in the game's release, the "game only" copies will still be available. As far as the Wii issue, since the writing of this article I have found a possible solution but it seems a bit dicey.
So the moral of this story is, always check your discs before inviting people to rock and don't set your Wii to the wrong settings or your screwed. Oh and Nintendo, if you are reading this GIVE US A WAY TO HARD RESET YOUR DAMNED CONSOLE.
That is all.
Fruit Brute
Posted to on 26 December 2007
· Comments (9)
Other stuff like this: breakdown, holiday, rock band, wii
I'm amazed that you are such an idiot when it comes to your video game systems.
The first day I had Rock Band and my brand new 360, the 360 ate my disc. I was plugging the usb connector in the back of the Xbox and I heard an evil sound from the depths arise from the new white box. After getting all excited to play with everyone with an instrument in hand, we went to select a song- disc unreadable. This was on Black Friday, mind you, so we rushed back to Circuit City, and stood in line for 45 minutes. The girl behind the counter was so fed up with her job that she didn't care if we scratched it or not, and she replaced it with a new one. My 360 sits horizontal henceforth.
The first day I had Rock Band and my brand new 360, the 360 ate my disc. I was plugging the usb connector in the back of the Xbox and I heard an evil sound from the depths arise from the new white box. After getting all excited to play with everyone with an instrument in hand, we went to select a song- disc unreadable. This was on Black Friday, mind you, so we rushed back to Circuit City, and stood in line for 45 minutes. The girl behind the counter was so fed up with her job that she didn't care if we scratched it or not, and she replaced it with a new one. My 360 sits horizontal henceforth.
@Amazed:
And I'm amazed that you posted a comment just to insult the author. Not only does it mean you're a rude prick, but the possible trolling indicates your time may be some of the most worthless on the planet.
@Fruit Brute:
I got a similar surprise when I brought my Wii to my parents' house. It has been set for 480p at my apartment and so it failed to produce a picture on my parents' CRT. Luckily, my dad ended up getting an HDTV for Christmas, so I used that to rectify the problem. However, I definitely agree that this was a major oversight on Nintendo's part.
A lot of shops that buy second-hand games have disc cleaning machines in the back of the shops. Ask one if they can clean your disk for you, they might say yes.
I can't believe you came out of that with more anger at Nintendo than at Microsoft. They vandalized your $60 disc, and their policy is to deny responsibility. And I don't know how you managed to "accidentally" set a Wii to progressive (I seem to recall there being adequate warning), but this is part of why I keep all my original cables in the same place when I upgrade.
I sympathize. That must have been hugely disappointing. But I'd sympathize more if your anger were directed where it should be.
Flynn:
Wait, you were using your component cables on your Wii to try and hook it up via composite? Wha?
There is one thing you may be able to try: Disconnect the Wii from power (that means disconnect the brick) for 1.5 minutes. Yeah, 1.5 minutes, not the standard 30 secs of all other electronics. (I was told this when by Nintendo Tech Support one time when I thought my power brick was dead and I kept trying to reset it by unplugging it for 30 secs to no avail - lo and behold he laughed and said "You're a comp sci person, aren't you?" ... "Yeah" ... "Yeah, it's 1.5 minutes with the Wii" ... "Oh")
Then, power on the Wii without the AV wire plugged into the system. That might reset your video output, though being at my parent's house with only SDTVs and the composite cable with me at the moment, I can't test out the theory.
Otherwise, the system automatically switches to 480i when you have the composite cables connected. (Though you knew that)
So having your 360 vertical is what causes it produce those horizontal scratches? My boyfriend has gone through two copies of Dead Rising and I was wondering how he kept messing them up. I guess now I know. Keeping it horizontal solves the problem them?
What's amazing to me is how you managed to set the Wii to 480... My option for that is greyed out (read: you can't choose it) unless I have the right cables and connection...
So... good job?