Achievement Unlocked: E74

Finished Assassin's Creed 2 in less than a day and a half, played all Saturday and a few hours on Sunday — you get a lot of points for completing the game's story line, over 800. In the evening I decided to play a bit of Dragon Age: Origins, which I'd been playing through for the last two weeks; a few minutes into the game artifacts started crawling across the screen, and after a reboot — a red light in the bottom right corner and E74 on the screen. After a while I turned it on, the first few minutes were fine, then it happened again, and this time the error wouldn't go away. The console is a first-revision Xbox 360 Pro Falcon, 17.5 months old; counting the times I was away, when it sat idle packed in a bag, it comes out to about 14 months of actual use, always standing vertically in an open space. Lately I'd been trying not to switch it off right after playing, avoiding temperature swings, and while I was playing through Assassin's the console froze dead twice while loading locations, and I had to do a hard reboot.

Judging by what people write on the forums, it's the standard problem — the GPU solder has come loose. You can cure it for a couple of days or weeks by overheating the console to two red lights, wrapping it in a blanket. Otherwise, the chip needs a reball, and nobody in town does console repairs — the sellers send you off to Kyiv or Dnipropetrovsk. And even that helps for a few weeks, a year at best.

It's a shame I'd only gotten about 60-70 percent through Dragon Age — it's a great game, I was thinking of playing through it a second time after the first. For now I don't know what to do — I'd like to find somewhere to bring the console back to life at least for a while. After the new year I'll get some kind of replacement, maybe a PC, maybe a PS3, or better yet an Arcade with the new "undetectable" firmware. I haven't logged into Live the last few weeks, to avoid getting banned, so the data on the hard drive isn't corrupted and it can easily be moved over to a new console. On the other hand, for now I don't see any games worth buying a console or a computer for — I got the Xbox for GTA IV, finished it and had my fill, beat both of its add-ons, though I haven't quite had my fill of those yet, but I got the main enjoyment out of the playthrough. And the need for an HD TV has now gone away too.