Kotaku: Target Gleefully Advertises Broken 360s for Sale

Kotaku shouldn’t take the sole blame for this, but as they were the most recent to print this – and I would have expected them to know better – they can take the brunt of it.

For those of you that don’t follow 360 news, when the 360 has technologically shit the bed – for any number of reasons – it will show three red lights in the Ring of Light. Ordinarily this Ring of Light flashes a pattern of Xbox-green goodness while the machine is starting up and then it reports how many controllers are active on the system. When there’s a system problem, however, a combination of red lights will appear. As machine started to flare up for people over the last year, this Ring of Light has become known as the Ring of Fire – the most common hardware problem with the box will cause three out of four lights to show red.

This week, in Target, they including the now-common ad for the 360 but this week there is a red ring showing in place of the Right of Light. Oops.

Now everyone in the gaming media is doing the “OMG!!11 TARGET IZ SELLING BR0XENZ 3600RZ!!eleven!!1” panic. And yes, I expected Kotaku to know better.

The 360 in the ad isn’t broken. If it was broken it would be showing 3/4 of a red ring of lights. You see, I’ve seen the all red Ring of Light. When all four quadrants are red you don’t have a machine problem. Oh there is a problem, but it’s between the Xbox Controller and the Sofa: you have a user problem. An entire red Ring of Light means the AV cable isn’t plugged in. Which means someone at the photo shoot decided to plug it in… “it’ll be cool to show off the lights.” Probably didn’t even have an AV cable… or maybe they thought the red was normal.

Either way, it’s ridiculous that it’s news at all. Even as a blunder.

The blunder to me is that no one ever stopped to think about what was causing the lights in the first place.

Oi.