The red Wiing of death

My office has become a console graveyard. It's like the scene in Gone with the Wind where the camera pulls back to reveal an endless array of dead and wounded Confederate soldiers. My SIXAXIS, as described in the control pad stress test, lies mangled and useless next to the PlayStation 3. The Dual Shock 3 comes out on April 15, so I need to try to make it a month without playing another PS3 game, or I'll have to buy another SIXAXIS. Yes, I have no one to blame but myself, but I'd still rather not sink $50 into a soon-to-be-obsolete peripheral if I can help it.

The much sadder sight is the empty Wii stand next to the TV. Say what you will about that little system, it's certainly easy on the eyes. And now it's gone, probably for another seven business days. I packed it off to FedEx this morning in an old J. Crew box. The idea was not to draw attention to the package's contents, as Nintendo recommends, but that's sort of hard to do when the address label blares "NINTENDO OF AMERICA" on two different lines. I did not feel confident handing it over to the purple-suited fellow behind the counter at my local FedEx Kinko's.

If you think my apprehension is unwarranted, let me tell you about the time I received a parcel from Rockstar Games that had been ripped open and retaped somewhere in transit. My copy of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas was nowhere to be found (although, fortunately, the thief had left me a sticker and a hat). The courier? Federal Express. I don't know what's worse: that FedEx employs thieves, or that said thieves probably post at NeoGAF.

Amid all this catastrophic hardware failure, there's one noisy, overheated, disaster-prone machine that just keeps humming along like nobody's business: Old Reliable, the Xbox 360. That console has just passed the two-year mark of uninterrupted service. It's like my office is sitting in some localized Bizarro dimension.

Having said that, I imagine my 360 has only weeks to live.