I received a frightening email this morning from a guy who claims he was a beta tester for the 360.

The extensive email outlines a slew of launch issues and ways to crash your 360. I'm hoping to God this guy isn't on the up and up, but I have a feeling he is, especially since I've experienced some of the problems he outlined and have had emails from people who experienced other issues.

OK, so here's the list, by category:

Games
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland
Described as the most problematic of the launch titles, the Micromole says you can nearly always cause a crash with a well-timed pause. Early in the game, in Beverly Hills he believes, you come across a
tagger guy doing graffiti. Go and talk to that guy one time, wait until he disappears and shows up in another part of town. If you pause the game right after you hit the button to talk to the tagger, the game will crash every time.

I've also received reports of the game not booting or the soundtrack skipping, though I've never experienced this.

Madden 2006 The game has problems playing on Live, according to the Mole and some consoles and hard drive configurations would not download roster updates correctly for the footballer.

Halo Try this game of profile hide-and-seek. Create a profile with the hard drive attached. During gameplay remove the hard drive and the 360 will reboot. Reattach the hard drive again and the system will reboot for a third time. Look for your profile saved onto Hard Drive, it will often disappear.

Hardware
Guide Button Try pushing the big silver button during a game's load screen, this can cause your system to lock-up. Try it during Project Gotham Racing 3 and see what happens.

DVD Drive Unrecognized DVDs should display a message that says the disc is unrecognized, but often doesn't.

Moving your 360 during gameplay may lead to the scratching of discs.

Playing of console horizontally is not advised and could lead to scratching of discs.

Live The number of classic games you have downloaded will not always correspond to the number your 360 says. Also "Zuma"
may be listed twice for some reason.

Backwards compatibility The top 20 sellers for the Xbox were supposed to work without any problems but several games, including a Tom Clancy title had some major problems. (I do remember reports of Splinter Cell disappearing from the BC list shortly after it went up on Xbox.com.) The Mole goes on to say that "virtually everything they said is a lie" about BC.

Here's what we need from you: Try and test out as many of these rumors as you feel comfortable testing. Don't do anything you think will mess up your 360. Anything you find out about the rumors email to us and we'll keep track and update on this page.

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