Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

I’m not sure what he saw while he was away in Canada but Tycho over at Penny-Arcade is still in shock over the unreliability of the Xbox 360′s in the wild. He wrote today:

360 failures always spike when a game worth playing comes out, which (to me) seems to imply that most of the three-sixties installed in homes currently are used as decoration. You’ll recall that it happened with Forza 2 and the sequel to Guitar Hero, as well. It’s incredible that we are in a situation where every time a worthwhile game sees release, it sweeps through the entire userbase with a scythe. Literally incredible, as in, I can’t [expletive deleted] believe it. It’s like flipping a coin, and every time it comes up heads four hundred dollars catches on fire.

As far as I can tell there still isn’t any evidence that the Xbox 360′s on store shelves have had the red rings problem fixed, just as there’s no known release date for the 65-nanometer chip set for the boxes. Will that chip set fix the problem, or will it be fixed already on the current larger chipset? Would a fix today only come to retail once the channel is emptied after the holidays?

Given Microsoft’s long history of duplicity on this problem and their silence on the HDMI Premium system upgrades to avoid orphaning non-HDMI Premium systems as unsold, it saddens me to realize that once Microsoft does solve the rampant red rings problem they probably won’t tell the world about it. It should be something to publicize, really, that those terrible days are going to be put behind them when the new fixed model rolls out. And, hm, now I see that those days really wouldn’t be behind them until everyone’s existing system died and was replaced. Plus that would mean all the machines in the retail channel would be orphaned as unreliable while people waited for just the right SKU to hit retail. Is it really better for Microsoft to lie and let people buy those unreliable systems, take the fall, and then have to replace them later?

If your goal is to build market share and nothing more and maybe get some licensing revenue in from software, I imagine anything is worth the cost.

Frankly it would make Microsoft look a lot better to just eat crow for five minutes of bad publicity and then get all the benefits of coming clean with a new, reliable 360 on the market that will reduce their future refurbishing budget with each and every unit sold. Would it hurt? Yes, but as we saw with the warranty announcement, consumers like it when you come clean about problems like this. The pain would be over quickly.

And if Microsoft wants to find out what crow tastes like, they can call up Sony. They wouldn’t even have to pay for shipping. There’s so much crow still left to eat over at Sony Computer Entertainment it will probably spill right through the receiver into their laps before they even say “Hello?”

From Penny-Arcade.