Red Rings Drop a Deuce

Like most things that touch my fingers, my X360 took its own life last week as I attempted to turn it on. It was a casual brush of the power button at first, which quickly became several increasingly-desperate attempts to avoid facing the inevitable.

He was gone.

About a year before, I was happy. My ex-X360 and I were happily entertaining a group of friends. Sam and I were terrorist hunting. I had recently been shot in the head.

"Whoa, way to go," Sam snarled snarkily as he stomped passed my corpse, cooly inserting a pair of bullets into the heads of men who hated freedom. Those around us chuckled at his hilarious use of sarcasm.

"Fuck you," I replied, "Ha ha, just kidding." But really I'm not kidding, I added in my brain.

Unfortunately, X360 must have thought I was talking to him, and, wildly offended, promptly killed himself. The red rings blinked like a muzzle flash from a pistol pointed at my dreams.

And it was over.

I thought another 360 would change things, but it really hasn't. And now, I'm on the rebound again, carelessly playing previous-gen Xbox games that know I don't really care about them. I had some good romps with The Godfather, sure, but today I actually inserted Darkwatch into the disk drive.

Darkwatch? What the fuck is that?

I'll tell you what it is. Its an awful, awkward western ghost-hunting FPS that took a control scheme a generation of gamers got used to playing Halo and switched all the buttons around so that instead of switching weapons, you start to fly. Oh, and instead of Cortana, it has a woman with a country music voice telling you to watch out for ghost Indians. Seriously. If I wanted to be bossed around by Reba McEntire, I'd pass out on the couch with Lifetime on and wait for her to build a nightmare in my subconscious.

Anyways. I've had Gears of War 2 since Christmas and didn't play it because I thought I should get through Fable 2 first. And now GOW2 doesn't have a home.

That's the last time I try to finish someth