Crackdown Cracks Again

Well, that totally sucks… after Geoff lost all of his saved data, I finally had a chance to check my own game.  I booted the game up and it signs me out of Live and tells me that there’s an update for me that I have to download.  That’s odd, I thought… I hadn’t heard of another update, but I figured maybe they had fixed the horrible bug that had plagued people.

I was way off.

When I tried to download the update, it immediately threw an error and told me it couldn’t, and to check my connection.  Then, it booted me back to the dashboard where I was immediately and automatically re-connected to Live.  Well, connection checked.

I reloaded the game, this time selected “No” to the “update” and after the several different screens of “HEY, WE MADE THIS GAME, AND WITH THESE TOOLS TOO”, I finally get the “Press start to play”.  I press start and get a message saying “Your downloadable content has been corrupted” with some kind of “Yes or No” (I think to re-downloading it or something).  Of course, I didn’t even get to choose an option, as the game, and console, completely froze.  Time for a hard restart.

After restarting, I go into my memory and delete all the DLC.  That ought to fix it, right?  After fiddling some more with the update that won’t update, I get back into the start screen again.  This time, I get a message saying “Your saved game has been corrupted.  Would you like to overwrite it with a new game?”  Once again, I never get to see what happens if I choose one of those options, since it freezes again.  Once again, I hard-reset.

Well, I played for a few hours, collected 100-some orbs, completed a few missions… I guess I can re-do that.  I deleted my save game, rebooted the game, once again tinkered with the “download update” (didn’t work), re-enter the start screen, it asks me where to save a new game, I tell it the HD and… it freezes AGAIN.  WTF.

Hard-reset, reboot, then, for my sanity, I pop Gears of War into my machine… Just want to make sure that my HD still appears to be working well.  To my welcome surprise, Gears of War also had an update to download.  I say yes to this and, lo and behold, it works.  Load up my Gears game, everything seems to be working great.

Ok… pop Crackdown back in, reboot… back at start screen and… it doesn’t freeze!  Hurray!  But I’m no longer connected to Live any more… I have to get that to work.  So, I have no idea why I think anything has changed, but I decide to try downloading the update one more time.  I restart the game, and to my absolute shock, it actually works.  Downloads the update.

So now, after over an hour of hassle just to play the damn game, I get to start fresh after losing several hours of my progress.  I can tell you for damn sure that I won’t be downloading any damn DLC for this game until they’re certain they’ve fixed these crappy bugs.

Man, I think the 360 has a lot of things going for it, but I can’t help but think that the last time I had so much trouble with things like this it was on a Windows computer.  Did Microsoft really have to bring the heartache of Windows gaming to the 360 as well?