S-RANK PATRONS: Get your questions in for December Q&A at https://www.patreon.com/posts/s-rank-patrons-q-45110887 or see the pinned post on https://patreon.com/petedavison/posts
Having a peculiar issue with the new Xbox. It works fine for the most part, but there's one specific environment in Project Gotham Racing that it won't load: the New York – Central Park map. I went out and bought a second copy of the game today (it's 50p) in the hopes that would fix the issue, but nope — exact same problem in the exact same place. Very strange!
I'm hoping this doesn't indicate some sort of DVD drive issue. It seems the Xbox I have is equipped with one of the crappy Thomson drives the initial models came with, though it hasn't shown any indication of fault other than this issue in Project Gotham, so I'm hoping it's just a random little bug. I've bought a DVD lens cleaner for the first time in about twenty years to see if giving the laser a little scrub will help. Fingers crossed! Worst comes to worse, I should be able to replace the drive — though it seems Xbox drives have a few peculiarities about them that mean you can't just swap in a regular old drive that would normally go in a PC without a bit of extra effort. But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
Aside from that, it seems to be working fine. I ripped a bunch of CDs to it last night and that had no problems — if the drive was failing, it would likely display a "dirty disc" error at least once, based on my past experiences with the platform — and the other games I have seem to work fine, so I've ordered a few more. I'm eyeing up a complete library of Xbox-exclusive stuff in the long term — that's only about 90 games or so if Wikipedia is accurate, so it's well within reach. Plus then there's the multiplatform games that run better or look nicer on Xbox too; will likely pick some of them up as well.
All in all, aside from the aforementioned issue, I'm very happy with it. Been meaning to grab one for ages now, so it's nice to finally have it. Here's hoping it lives a long and happy life!
Discover more from I'm Not Doctor Who
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
