Posted Mar 12, 06:17 AM in Games by Scott Conley

The 360 is finally showing its roots.

Last night, I found a repeatable console lockup while playing Call of Duty 2 for Xbox 360. Just after kicking off the Hill 400 American campaign, you are asked to clear some houses in a small village where the cold temperatures and rain mean fogged breath and wet-darkened uniforms.

My problem occurs when approaching the second house. After clearing the first one, and window-shooting all the enemies in the second, you are left to approach the second (or the open field beyond it). In either case, something triggers the poor console to lock up. Frozen. No controller buttons. Only thing to do is force the power off.

I did say it was repeatable? Try EIGHT times in a row. (Thank you, I appreciate the obvious comparisons to the learning abilities of monkeys and rats)

Worse, I can’t find anything online about this game specifically locking up at this point. The Xbox support site offers a modicum of insight , but hardly anything to suggest this specific problem. It might be overheating the power supply, but odd that it’s so repeatable- and further, previous lockups have been intermittent.

So I cleaned the disc. (This was around failure 5).

Now I’m left to annoyance. Should I replace the console? Take it back to Target? Anybody have a CoD2 disc I could borrow (see if it’s actually the disc?) Next up I intend to pull the power supply unit out of it’s spot in the TV cart and drag it over to near the cool window. That is, assuming I can find a boat trailer to move it.

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