Backing Up XBox 360 Games

I will love when the time comes when you don't have to do any "cracking" to get backups of your games, I have three kids for crying out loud, they're 5, 4 and 1 years old (nooo, my youngest kid doesn't play yet), but can I really ask the other two not to make a single scratch of my games?

I found a terrific site where they teach you all you need to make backups, unfortunately, you need a very specific DVD drive and I don't have one. There's a different method but you have to have your DVD drive open and do very strange stuff to make the backup. I don't want to risk my $80 DVD drive so I can make a backup of a $60 game my kids could or could not actually scratch.

If you, on the other hand, think taking the risk is worth it, you can find the guide in a site called www.xbox-scene.com. In order to play backed up games you would have to modify the firmware of the XBox 360's DVD drive, which can be a daunting task, but they have a lot of very detailed tutorials for every step. Of course this would void your warranty and I won't even start about the legallity of the whole process...

Grand Theft Auto IV

Dude, what a cool game. It's definitely not a good game to play while your kids are watching, a lot of violence, even more compared to, say, San Andreas. Playability is similar but with a lot, A LOT more twists to the story. You're main goals are still similar, but man, what a story line, it's like you're playing a full movie.

I have to be honest, I'm still about half way of the game, I've finished about 50 or 60 missions, but you start enjoying the differences 15 minutes into the game.

I don't want to ruin the experience by buying a full guide, but I feel I'm leaving so much without doing that I'm definitely going to get one and redo it all after I'm done. This is a game worth playing more than once.

Fixing XBox 360 Red Ring Of Death

I've joined the huge group of frustrated XBox 360 users that suffer because of the overly common Red Ring Of Death. My wife didn't miss the oportunity to say: "See! I told you, you shouldn't play for so many hours in a row, now you screwed our console and I was just starting Grand Theft Auto IV".

Having a lot of knowledge about computers and electronics I thought to myself: "I'll prove you (my wife) I can fix it in no time" and, of course, hit Google looking for some guidelines.

I was amazed to have found so many different kinds of fix for the problem, but I got to tell you, I found one that amazed me the most. It's called the "Towel Trick". Man! the method asks you to wrap your XBox in a towel and powering it up !!! C'mon, who could think of something like that.

Anyway, I found This Guide and after reading it, even the towel method made perfect sense (in a way). The guide is actually an infinitely more professional way of fixing the problem without the risk of setting your whole house on fire, not to mention burning your XBox.

I played for about 3 hours right after fixing the console following the guide and it didn't fail again. I've played a lot ever since and have had no problems at all, so I would say it's fixed. I'm so glad I didn't have to wait for weeks to get it fixed by Microsoft or pay I don't know how much in technical support from a computer shop.

And of course I enjoyed the face of my wife when she saw the thing working again... :D