The Beast is back! ....Sort of...

Grandma's XBox 360 came back from repair just before last weekend. Well, not really her 360. It's a replacement unit with an April 2007 manufacture date and a new serial number. Apparently The Beast was beyond repair. Microsoft treated Grandma well throughout the whole ordeal; but there is still a DRM issue we're trying to get corrected (They are walking her through the process of getting all 47 of Grandma's XBLA games to work correctly on the other profiles on the machine.)

She's been playing Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters on the PSP along with Oblivion (again) on the PS3, and now that she has a 360 again, she's become somewhat of a Catan addict.

The night before the 360 arrived, Grandma had checked the UPS tracking number forwarded to her by the Microsoft repair system... thing.. and confirmed that it was scheduled to arrive sometime between 8am and 7pm. Someone would have to sign for the package, otherwise it would go back to some pickup center in Northeast Ohio. Grandma is extremely hard of hearing, and I'm not much help if I'm downstairs, and neither one of us really entertained the idea of positioning a chair next to the front door and staring out at the driveway for 11 hours like some crazed redneck ready to take potshots at a census pollster with a rifle.

So we devised a better solution:


Even after our brilliant and artistic plan went into effect, we were both paranoid for the rest of the day; jumping up to the front door at the slightest of sounds. The collective panic was never denied, all it took was one of us to say "did you hear something?" and we would both bolt to the door with our faces scrunched together by the tiny window to get a better view of the front porch. It would have been funny if it wasn't so god damn sad.

When the unit came, I happened to be the one closest to the door so I signed for it, brought it into the game room and took a picture of the box. Grandma looked over and yelled at me for not immediately telling her of it's arrival.

"Goddammit!" she said. "I've been waiting for how long for the fucking thing and you don't tell me because you want a picture of the goddamn box! I would have let you take a picture if you wanted before I opened it. Christ!"

So she opened the box.

It was a similar two-foam-inserts and a static bag set up as when we sent hers out to the repair center, plus a letter apologizing for the inconvenience and instruction on how to hook everything back together.



After we snapped the HardDrive to the new unit and plugged in the Component, Audio, and Power Supply cables, we fired it up and fucking prayed. We're not religious people by any means, but we're not typically lucky in such situations either. The possibility of getting the wrong unit back was something that crossed our minds simultaneously; just at that moment when the ring of light started pulsating and working it's magic.

It worked beautifully.

There was a brief setup for transferring her XBox Live Account and Gamertag to the new machine so the XBLA games would work, and everything was right again.

Almost.

Mom is the kind of causal gamer that craves Luxor 2 and Zuma, and her profile on Grandma's 360 was chock full of achievements in such games. The repair came back with a card good for a month of XBox Live, and Grandma mentioned in an email to Evan that she would probably give the card to Mom so she could compete a bit and add her scores to the leaderboards. Evan replied back that he had a code for a year of XBox Live if she wanted it, and it was Mom who answered back "Thank you thank you thank you YES!!!"

Evan has always been cool like that.

But it was after Mom had created an XBL account (Gamertag "LSainte" if you want to send her a friend request; she's kind of lonely at the moment in the gaming world) that she and I realized that all the XBLA games for any profile other than OGHC now reverted to the trial versions of the game.

It's a known DRM issue, Mike from Microsoft is working with Grandma now to correct it, and there is even a "download again" feature in the marketplace for such things, it's just a matter of us getting it to work (it hasn't yet.)

The new games Grandma has downloaded since the repair, such as Catan and Double Dragon, work on all profiles, but the older ones are in limbo.

We'll update you as soon as we find a fix, I know a few of you have gone through similar things with your 360's.

So!

Our next post is going to be about Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters for the PSP. I'll try and get some video, but it's different for handhelds; a little more complicated. Grandma is trying to teach me how to play Catan, and we're both trying out some evil characters in Oblivion just for the hell of it. As it is now, Grandma is looking for something to really sink her tooth into after she's done with Ratchet and Clank.

Any ideas? What are you playing right now? It can be for any system; Grandma just needs some recommendations.

Also, I have to share this one with you guys: We were at Wendy's one day for lunch and noticed they had those weird little Wii toys and figures so Grandma and I decided that if they had a cool one that day, we'd just fucking buy the thing to accent her Nintendo Wii shrine.

It turns out they did have the Mario Ridin' a Shell toy, so we asked the girl how much they were.

Wendy's Girl - "You can't buy them."
Grandma - "What? Why not?"
Wendy's Girl - "You have to order the kid's meal."
Grandma - "..."
Me - "Well how much is the kid's meal? I'll have one of them."
Wendy's Girl - "Umm... which one do you want?"
Me - "I don't care. Hamburger. Whichever one will give us Mario."

She laughed for a really long time.


Game on!