I solved a mystery. A few days ago, there was a monster storm that came through town, knocking down a power poll 3 houses down around 1am. When I woke up… it was a nice 52 degrees in my house. I live in Florida, and 52 degrees in Florida is like -20 degrees in most other parts of the world. I called up a friend, Bill, at 8:30 (oops. it was 7:30, thank you DST) and said ‘dude, it’s f***ing cold and I have no power’. He invited me over and I chilled there for a while
I went home around 11:30am, and power was restored, but I was in technological hell. Why? No internet, no cable. It was out. The cute neighbor next door stopped by asking me if I had cable, and I said no. Her cell phone was dead so I invited her in and we both called the cable company to report the outage.
I powered on the 360, and started up Rock Band. Something seemed off. It said I only had 82 songs, when I knew I had over 100. I started looking through the list, and SOME of my downloadable content was missing, including the Grateful Dead pack, which I just love.
This has been bugging the crap out of me for 3 days now, and I finally figured out why I could see some songs and I couldn’t see others. Jen and I often get together on Tuesdays to check out new content, and I’ll bring my hard drive there and buy the songs on her machine. When you download a song on a DIFFERENT 360, and you are not online (remember my cable was out), you can only see songs that were downloaded on that machine. I’m guessing there’s 2 stages of copy protection. Your Xbox Live account and your Xbox Serial Number.
So, I’m half tempted to try and re-download the songs, but I’ve heard bad things about that. Maybe I’ll just hope my cable doesn’t go out again when I want to play Franklin’s Tower. If anyone has a proven way of fixing this feel free to let me know in a comment. Thanks.
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1kiggidykev
on Mar 11, 2008 at 9:43 am:
This copy protection jazz is a massive pain for those of us who have had to return a 360 for the Red Rings of Death, and then get a console back with a different serial number!
Microsoft’s not-so-helpful customer service said it’s possible to switch it over to the new console, but it’s taking us 30 days. Beware!
2ImmortalNormal
on Mar 11, 2008 at 9:34 pm:
That is strange. My sons XBOX 360 has never been signed onto live and I take my hard drive in his room and play Rock Band with him on his system. All DL content is on his system.
3Rob
on Mar 12, 2008 at 12:29 pm:
It only happens with SOME content and not all. I told Mike about this a few weeks ago and he scoffed at me. It has something to do with being signed into XBL because it only happens when I’m not signed in.
Some of the first songs I DL’d were there and some of the most recent ones were there, so I couldn’t tie it down to any type of timeframe of downloads, but I can tell you that Black Crows and Foreigner were gone. For me it was exactly 20 songs. Could be more now that I also have the Grateful Dead pack, but I haven’t tested it since Mike told me I was crazy and, well, he is always right!!
I found a similar problem with arcade games. They show as trial, but not unlocked, and I can’t DL them again. MS Support told me to create another live account, download and pay for them again. Totally sucked. Poker and Puzzle Quest just to name a few.
4Mike
on Mar 12, 2008 at 12:35 pm:
Rob is correct, I am always right.
5Corrie
on Mar 12, 2008 at 8:02 pm:
Here’s the deal on how this works.
When you buy DLC it record both your console hardware ID and your gamertag. The DLC is effectively linked to both.
If one changes (most often the console obviously) the link is broken and unless you are online to prove that you were the one who bought it originally, the console will not let you play the full thing or see the content.
I’ve spent well over $200 on DLC and XBLA games and it really bums me out that I HAVE to be online to use any of it. What happens if the next xbox comes out and I want to go back to play some old games I liked and none of that is supported anymore?