Hidden Blade To The Cooling Fan

I got a half day from work yesterday, so I was home early to relax and enjoy Assassins Creed: Revelations. Except my brother was also online, so we raced through Acts 3, 4 and 5 of Gears of War 3 in just short of three hours on Casual to get him his four-player co-op Achievement. It was insanely good fun, very frantic and a totally different experience from the cautious approach of Hardcore and beyond.

But once we had it wrapped up I had the evening free to enjoy the final chapter in Ezio Auditore da Firenze's life as a master assassin.

I eagerly jumped into it, having only played a short few minutes before bed the night before, and was completely engrossed in the world in moments.

I was ripped savagely out of it again when my Xbox 360 decided that it was feeling a bit hot under the collar and shut itself down, displaying a red semi-circle around the power button.

I've had the dreaded Red Ring Of Death before, and it's not fun. But my Xbox was running fine since I got it repaired, up until recently. I got this over-heating shutdown once about two weeks ago, but moved the powerbrick, cleaned the vents, did anything I could think of to help, and all seemed fine.

Today, it red-semi-circled on me three times.

Hoping that it is just a heating issue, we've moved it onto the main dinner table, next to a window we can leave open. There is a cool, early winter breeze blowing across the machine now, and I managed to get through a fair chunk of the game without any more failures.

Out house does get very warm. We have, at times, a laptop, a PC, an Xbox and the heating, which we can't adjust for our individual apartment because it's a whole building thingy, and then on top of all that we have cooking just adding to the rising heat. I find it stifling. Claire complains if I open a window. It's a definite impasse at times.

For now, the Xbox is going to live on the table. We'll have to see how long that lasts. Should it die, I'm going to either grab a second hand one on the cheap, or hold out for the matte black S model due next month and treat myself to a shiny (not gloss shiny, though) new Xbox 360.

Hopefully I won't have to choose. I really like my Xbox, and the thought of having to sort out data transfer and region coding just frustrates and confuses me.