So my primary hobby is gaming, and I spend a fair amount of time and money on it. What are the odds that in the same timeframe Sony Playstation’s PSN service would go down for a month+ due to being hacked, and my just over 3 year old (read: just out of warranty) xbox 360 would Red Ring of Death? 100% likely as it turns out. Just a couple of days after the PSN network blew up, my Xbox died as I sat down to watch a movie on it. I’m especially pissed about the xbox because I intentionally held off buying one for several years because the RROD issue became well known and I decided to hold off for a hardware revision, assuming Microsoft would address the issue. They didn’t. Supposedly it’s addressed in the newest ‘slim’ models (I bought an Elite shortly after they came out), but at this point, having had my first generation xbox die and now my 360 die, I’m not so sure I want to buy back into the platform. It’s a real dilemma though, because I have literally dozens of games for the thing, as well as many peripherals (the controllers alone go for $50/pop and I have 4 of them), and selling everything off will earn me pennies on the dollar. Plus, I’m figuring my soon-to-be toddler would enjoy the Kinect motion control stuff MS is pushing these days.

So…what to do. I can’t decide. I’m sitting pat for now. E3, the biggest gaming industry trade show, is next month, and I’m going to see what comes out of that before doing anything.  I should note that while the PS3 still works, mostly, aside from multiplayer, I’m worried trophies won’t sync correctly when the network comes back up, so I’ve been staying off of it. Meantime, it’s back to gaming on the PC primarily.