So, for Christmas, my mom gets me a copy of Tony Hawk Underground for the X-Box. Woo-hoo! Tony Hawk 4 is the only game I’ve ever gotten 100% completion. I’ve been totally looking forward to this one. I don’t have time to play it until the day after Christmas, when I finally take it out of the shrink wrap, pop it in my console… and it can’t read the disc. I panic briefly, but my X-Box still works on all my other games and DVDs. “Must be a defective disc,” I think. Luckily, my mom kept the receipt, so I trundle back to the store and exchange it for another copy.
Which also doesn’t work. Well, I’m not hugely impressed by the quality control over at Activision right now, but shit happens. I still really want to play this game. I fire off an e-mail to their customer support, outlining my problem, and asking if I can exchange the disc with them directly, as the store my mom bought the game at won’t accept a second return. Yesterday, I got this response:
Excuse me? I need to upgrade my X-Box to play your fucking game? Bullshit! I’ve got about a dozen other X-Box games, many of them just as new, if not newer, than Tony Hawk Underground. They all work fine. I’ve got more than a hundred DVDs, and I haven’t had any problems with any of them. The TH discs weren’t scratched or dirty: each had spent a grand total of 2.5 seconds outside of the box it came in before it gave me this error. The problem is not with my X-Box, no matter how old it is (answer: not very). Goddamn it, the entire fucking point of console gaming is that you don’t have to dick around with hardware requirements! If you have an X-Box, you can play any X-Box game, right out of the package, without dicking around with system settings or processor speed or how much fucking RAM you’ve got! Jesus Christ! “The X-Box has gone through four or five revisions since launch.” Then you fucking test your game on all five revisions to make sure it fucking works, you goddamned cretins! This isn’t the PC market, where there are so many different hardware combinations you can’t possibly test for them all: you’ve got one fucking platform you’ve got to worry about here: you know exactly what’s going to be in each and every X-Box, but apparently making sure your game will work for everyone who buys it is just too goddamned hard for you thumbless monkeys.
Keep your fucking game. Keep all your fucking games. If your company is so totally incompetent that your console games are having hardware conflicts than I’m not interested in giving you assholes any more money. You sumbitches just lost a customer.
So, why the vitrol at Tony Hawk? Did he design the X-Box or the layout for the data on the game disk? Say what you will about him being a media whore, anyone who dominates their profession for over a decade is a force to be reckoned with. Activision, Microsoft, both of them suck and both probably share some part of the legitimate blame for this issue(shifting standards within the lifespan of a single console is pretty shitty). But Tony didn’t do nuthin’ to you. He’s grrrrreeeaat.
You bought a console made by Microsoft, and you expect that it will be compatible with every single game made for it?! A console that has error messages?!
Actually, it wouldn’t suprise me if those four or five revisions were impossible for Activision to work around. Then again, maybe they just have bad testing policies. Just assume they’re both at fault, and buy a Gamecube:)
I’ve been having problems with just about every game that’s come out for the XBOX since about September. Even Microsoft’s newer stuff, including their Music Mixer, won’t work with my XBOX. I bought my XBOX about a month after it was initially released.
Strangely enough, Tony Hawk Underground is one of the few new games that I don’t get a dirty disc error with.
Mtgman: I should have specified that I was pitting Tony Hawk the video game franchise, and not Tony Hawk the totally thrashin’ pro skater. I apologize for any distress I may have caused Mr. Hawk or his family.
lezlers:
emekthian: I have a CameCube. I’m just waiting for them to release some good games for it. But that’s a whole 'nother rant.
Starbury: My X-Box is of slightly more recent vintage, but like I said, every thing else I try to run on it works fine, even stuff that just came out. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with my console.
Gadfly, I wouldn’t count Prince of Persia as a GameCube game because it’s available on other platforms. Such as the X-Box, where I’ve been greatly enjoying it with no problems whatsoever. I’ve got Metroid Prime already, and is one of only two must-buy games I’ve seen that are GameCube exclusive (the other is Eternal Darkness). I’ve played all the current Mario games on my friend’s system, and haven’t been impressed enough to buy 'em. Heard good things about Viewtiful Joe, been meaning to check it out. If I can squeeze a refund out of Activision, maybe I’ll use it to pick that game up.
I read this as “Fuck you, Activism! Fuck you, Tony Hawk!”, and I swear to God, it’s been driving me batty trying to think of what causes Tony Hawk supports.
As for Tony Hawk’s Underground, can’t help you with the XBox problems but I was playing on my friend’s PS2 and it was pretty awesome. Although, I think I liked TH 4 better.
Given the track record Microsoft has with its other products, I wonder why Activision is getting the blame here. These things don’t happen with Sony, do they?
Isn’t there a fix for dodgy disks that involve boiling them or otherwise washing them with hot water? I can’t remember the details exactly, but I’ve had several friends fix xbox and dreamcast disks with that method before.
Let me guess–you have a Thomson drive! People on xbox message boards have been complaining for months about this. There are three different drives in Xboxes–the Philips, the Thomson, and the Samsung. The Samsung is the best of the three.
If you do a google search, you can find a picture of what each drive looks like. The Philips and Thomson ones are fairly similar, but the Samsung one has several holes in the disc tray (the others just have one long cutout). Oh, never mind, here you go.
And rjung, Sony had their share of problems with the PS2 as well. Many, many of the launch systems eventually got so that they couldn’t read PS1 games or blue-bottom PS2 games. Sony knows they farked this up big time, and even to this day will repair that error for free even if your warranty long since expired. But don’t expect Electronics Boutique to tell you that, they all have these big signs that say “Disc read error? Trade in you PS2 and get a brand new one for 79.99!” To be fair, the brand new PS2s now read DVD-R and come with an infrared remote control port built in, but that’s probably not worth $79.99 to many people.
As for Burnout, make sure you get Burnout 2. It has a thing called “crash mode” where the idea is to floor it for a little bit, then plow into an intersection or traffic jam and cause the most possible damage.
Well, when I bought either Final Fantasy Anthology or Final Fantasy Chronicles (don’t remember which one exactly it is that has this problem) the only way to get it to work in an older (1997) PlayStation was to turn the entire unit upside-down and then turn it on to play. I have no idea why that works, but it did.
