The XBox 360 Kinect hardware now lets you control your XBox by talking to it. That's all well and good, and apparently it works reasonably well, but the vast majority of owners (including me) use our XBoxes almost exclusively to play games.

No matter how hard you try, no amount of talking to your XBox is going to get it to grab a game disc and insert it into the disc tray. Now, if tomorrow we all wake up in fantasy land, where the big media companies have finally realized that copy protection and DRM are utterly pointless, we could all merrily install our games onto nice big hard drives connected to our XBoxes. At that point, voice control starts to become useful. Of course, you still need to find the controller to play a game...

On the other hand, people who have hacked their XBoxes, allowing them to run games directly off the hard drive - without requiring the disc - may find this very useful.

So, is Kinect voice control the best reason yet to hack your Xbox 360?

The XBox 360 has a feature that lets you 'install' a game to the hard drive. My immediate reaction upon learning of this feature was no doubt the same as everyone else's: "Awesome! Now I won't have to keep swapping discs whenever I want to play a different game!" If only.

Click "read more" for the rest of the story...

My first XBox 360 - the one I just recently resurrected from the Red Ring of Death - died again. After several weeks of use, the graphics and sound started getting corrupted after a few minutes of play, then finally just gave me the RRoD on startup. But I brought it back to life once more!

Now that I have two functioning XBox 360s, I was thinking that at long last I would be able to play certain games cooperatively. You know, games that have co-op modes but only when you're playing on-line or with multiple 360s on a LAN. Co-op gameplay on a single console is usually limited to games that support splitscreen, but also includes many sports games and some fantasy-type games such as Gauntlet and its ilk, where all the characters are visible at the same time on one screen.

My hope was that games with online-only co-op modes would now be mine to explore. As it turns out, this hope can be fulfilled, for a price. That's the price of a second copy of every game I want to play cooperatively. Yes indeed, for another sixty bucks I can play the game in a way that should have been included to begin with. Oh, I tried starting the game on one console, then running it on the other, but as soon as I ejected the disc from the first console, the game exited back to the dashboard. Even installing the game to the hard drive made no difference. Ah, the joys of copy protection.

So now I'm thinking that since my first 360 is already in warranty-voided-land, I might as well finish the job and hack it so I can run copies of games. There's no frigging way I'm going to buy second copies of a bunch of games.

Stay tuned.

UPDATE 2009-11-12: Apparently Microsoft just killed XBox Live network access for a huge number of modded 360s and the owners are now unloading them on Craigslist (http://gaming.icrontic.com/news/craig...-xbox-360s). Maybe I'll hold off on that modding notion.

Now that I have a workbench again, I'm getting back into old projects. My first XBox 360 died with the classic Red Ring of Death some time ago and has been sitting in a storage locker in the form of a pile of parts since then. When it died, I had already voided the warranty some months earlier by opening the unit to install padding under the lid of the DVD drive - to stop it from scratching discs. That repair had been a complete success, but then the RRoD happened. I would have been able to send the unit back to Microsoft for warranty repair if I hadn't opened it because they extended the warranty to three years specifically for RRoD issues.

Sigh. I bought my second XBox 360 after my first died of the horrible 'Red Ring of Death.' I had successfully modified that 360 a few months earlier, installing padding (under the lid of the DVD drive) that prevented the drive from scratching my game discs. Unfortunately, opening the 360 had also eliminated the possibility of returning it for repair/replace as part of the extended 3 year coverage specific to RRoD issues. Oh well. That 360 is now a pile of parts in a box. I tried one of the X-clamp fixes on it with no success and plan to keep trying at some point, but meanwhile I bit the bullet and bought another 360.