Rolf Ebeling
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Sep 25, 2007 12:05 AM
At Newsweek HQ, most of our colleagues are either boomers in name
or boomers in spirit, which means there haven't been many serious
gamers among our ranks. But from the increasing number of game-related
conversations we've had with our office mates, it's clear that this is
starting to change. Our de facto Xbox 360 correspondent Rolf Ebeling,
who in his day job is the creative director for Newsweek.com, posted
here back in July about how the Red Ring of Death nightmare had tested his affection for the Xbox 360. In today's
entry, he describes the lows (yet another 360 going red ring on him)
and the highs (slipping into a Halo 3 hands-on event weeks before the
average gamer) of being a member of the so-called Xbox Nation.
Recently, I was fortunate enough to ride N'Gai's coattails and sneak
into a preview night for Halo 3--a choice invite that would make my
fellow twelve-year-olds-at-heart quietly curse my name. To be honest,
it was a bittersweet experience.
When you last heard from me, I
described how my love for my Xbox 360 was sliding down from
unconditional by Microsoft essentially admitting that something wasn't
right with the design. It is remarkable that a leading DIY solution to
fixing a 360 stricken with the red ring of death is to swaddle it in
towels: swaddling is how you make a baby fall asleep, not how you
should have to revive home electronics. Now that I had shot my mouth
off here on the permalinks of Level Up, I feared my prediction of my
Xbox shuffling off its digital coil would come to pass. It flat-lined,
of course. At first I was resigned, mildly annoyed that I would have to
wait to play the new Ayn-Rand-with-guns-and-creepy-little-vampire-girls
epic BioShock--but looking at a calendar and seeing September 25th only
weeks away was no-scope shot to the head: I was going to miss Halo 3.
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