Halo 3 Xbox 360 Red Ringing - Killer Game, Killing XBoxes

Could Microsoft have possibly known in advance of Halo 3’s apparent ability to route out Xbox consoles on the verge of hardware failure causing them to commit hara-kiri when they acted to extend Xbox warranties (at an envisaged cost of $1.5 billion) recently – who can tell, but what’s not in doubt is the fact that Halo 3’s demands on the console are becoming increasingly apparent with numerous forum posts reporting machines red-ringing only minutes into playing the game.

Coincidence, perhaps, though it’s also interesting to note that, just this week, the new Xbox 360 ‘Falcon’ was reported on widely in the techie-sphere on account of it utilising newly revised 65nm production core and graphics processors that just happen to run cooler thus minimising the risk of red-ringing caused by consoles overheating (something we’ve experienced at first hand).

And, surely it just also happens to be pure coincidence that one of the first consoles to show up with the new, cooler running chips just happens to be the Halo 3 Special Edition Xbox 360?

Of course, you’re free to draw your own conclusions but, whichever side of the fence you fall on, what is for certain is that there is a growing, evermore vocal element of Xbox owners reporting overheating problems resulting in either systems freezing or complete hardware failure when playing Halo 3.

XBox 360 Halo 3 Special Edition

One of the first 360’s to feature 65nm chips.

“Halo 3 is making me mad.”, one forum poster writes. “It freezes my 360 for no reason. My 360 is having all these issues all thanks to Halo 3. For the 10 minutes I got to play it, it was very fun. I have red rings for first time“.

Another writes, “This overheating issue has got to stop. See this is the worst case scenario for anyone who is about to play Halo 3, your about to play Halo 3 and all of a sudden your 360 dies on you! I mean come on people we have to do something about this! I mean what are we going to do us the Halo community and all the rest of the dedicated gamers, Microsoft has to fix this problem this problem could possibly be the death of Halo 3!”

Ok, so claiming that these issues could spell the death of Halo 3 is a little over dramatic (and patently fanciful considering the established hardcore fan base the game has) but there’s no doubt that Halo 3 is routing out older versions of the console in a particularly harsh fashion.

The question is, however, did Microsoft see this coming – hence the sudden extension of warranties and the new revision of the console, all curiously timed to coincide with Halo 3’s release? Or is such speculation merely a frag in the dark?

[Forum Quotes Courtesy of Smarthouse]