Tony

(or, alternatively, For whom the red lights flash)

It tolls (they flash) for me.

Mrs. buttonMasher mentioned to me earlier this week that the 360 was acting up, freezing during the kids movies, going fuzzy and finally it stopped working all together. I powered it up Saturday night and sure enough, I was greeted with the three flashing red lights. Anyone who’s dealt with a 360 before knows what that means.

I had previously watched with apprehension as people on my friends list would suffer the fate of the red lights. I read with pity about the guy who had seven boxes die on him. I even thought I had made a mistake buying extended warranty coverage on my 360. Then the inevitable happened — it happened to me.

Perhaps the catastrophic failure I had while playing Dead Rising was a portent of things to come. Maybe it was just the poor ventilation in my TV stand. Whatever the case, it’s dead now and there’s not much else I can do.

So in the mail goes my dead 360. I doubt I’ll be seeing it again for a couple weeks. Looks like the criminals in Pacific City just got a reprieve.

I hope they know it won’t last!

So over the weekend, I played a few hours of Crackdown co-op with buttonmashing.com friend Bobster. The experience was a total blast. I’ve never laughed as hard as I did playing Crackdown with someone else. The fun started kicking each other off high buildings and never stopped. Whether it was running over innocent pedestrians or flying over the rooftops, the co-op experience was top shelf. An absolute blast. My sides and head hurt I was laughing so much. If you’ve been there, you know what I’m talking about. So the co-op session was a success. The fall-out, however, might be a problem.

Since I was further along in the single player campaign, we decided to have Bobster host the game. After we took down the kingpin of Los Muertos, we turned our attention to the Volk gangsters. Before we played, I had taken out a couple Volk Generals, so we went to take those out first. We took down a handful of Volk Generals and then went our seperate ways. Today, I fired the game up to clean up the Volk and turn my attention to the Shai-Gen.

I pulled up the map and something was amiss. I looked at the list of Volk Generals, and one was missing (the kingpin). The first General I took down (one of the female Generals, I don’t remember who) was showing up as killed, but on the map it was showing her location as the location of the kingpin. Her actual location wasn’t shown on the map. So I cruised to where she should be, and sure enough, she was gone. The Agency was all over her location. So I headed over to where the kingpin should be (the place the female General shows up) and again, he was nowhere to be found. Crap! Something was not right.

I reset the game, reloaded my saved game and looked. Nothing changed. I couldn’t get the intel on the Kingpin, because the game thought I had already taken him out, even though I never fought him. So I was stuck. I could get to him because he was already gone, even though I never beat him.

Okay, so that was probably hard to follow. Long of the short is — I played co-op and my Crackdown save game seems to be corrupted now.

So I did what I always do with presented with a problem: I went to the oracle to present my problem. One of the first results was this post on Xbox360Fanboy. While it’s not exactly my problem, the comments make it seem like I’m not the only one with this type of problem.

Has anyone else who’s play Crackdown co-op had this problem? I hope this is something that can be fixed and I really, really, REALLY hope a fix will be forthcoming. It’d be frustrating if I had to start all over, just from some multiplayer bug. That would be a pain.