So as I was mindlessly killing... just about everything in Crackdown the the other day, my screen goes blank, and the 360 resets itself. As the disc starts to spin up, I hear this... noise. A noise that the 360 is NOT supposed to make. You know the one. That broken up grinding noise that might remind someone of an 18-wheeler down-shifting at top speed.

I got the tray open, and rescued my game disc and powered the system down. I waited a few minutes and turned it back on, and then there they were. Like the lowest circle of hell - taunting me. Mocking me with their blood red evil light. After about 10 or 15 minutes of cursing, and turning the system off and on, I finally managed to start making it into the dashboard. My XBL account couldn't sign in, but other than that I seemed to have most of the functionality back. It was only temporary, as after a few minutes I'd be kicked out again. In a last ditch effort to save my xbox from a 4 week excursion to an MS Tech bench, I formatted the hard drive.

It works fine now.

However I have now lost -ALL- my saved games. I thought hey, no big deal, I'll just play them again - it'll be fun to get the achievements back. Good times had by all.

Alas - there is NO WAY to reset the gamerscore, or achievements. I had never thought of them as a one shot deal... I assumed that for the sake of replayability you could at anytime delete them. I was actually kind of looking forward to resetting my gamerscore to zero and starting all over. Not that my score was that high to begin with, nothing I couldn't get back with one or two completed games. Plus alot of my score came from friends playing on my account, some titles I don't even own, nor have ever played, so I was glad to be able to go through my own games and get the points myself. Damn.