December 31, 2008

  • time to vent on here too.

    i came home from work early tonight, with the intention of getting ready for a new year's party at my friend's house.  about halfway into my shift, i got a text asking me to bring my 360 controller and some games.  so i thought it would be fun to copy my SC4 save data and show off some of my custom characters.

    i boot up my 360 and start cleaning out my memory card.  i see that i have an old copy of my gamer profile on there, which i didn't really need, so i open the options menu and hit "delete."  a confirmation dialog pops up, and i just up+a it, since i thought it was the standard "are you sure you want to delete this data" dialog.  turns out, it was actually a dialog asking me how much data to delete: just the profile, or profile + items.  up+a chose profile + items.  in the fraction of second before the dialog disappeared, i thought "that can't mean what i think it means."

    and then i was signed out of xbox live.

    i check my hard drive.  Gamer Profiles = 0 kb.  the only data left in the Games folder is DLC, Live Arcade games and the one 360 game i installed on my HDD.

    yeah.  for some reason, microsoft programmed the 360 to not only delete a gamer profile from a memory card, but also from any attached storage.  and that particular option wipes out any save data from any attached storage on your 360 when it is selected.  and it does this with only a single prompt.

    my profile is recoverable.  the ~2 years worth of save data is not.

    Braid.  Castle Crashers.  Bioshock.  Gears of War 1 and 2.  Eternal Sonata.  SotN.  Beautiful Katamari.  CoD4.  Soul Calibur 4.  Burnout: Revenge.  GTA4.  all gone.

    it's probably going to be a while before i can bring myself to even touch that thing again.

    way to fucking go, Microsoft.  way to fucking go.