You're a guest on my Xbox. Act like it.

A few general things to keep in mind when playing on someone else's Xbox:

• I've got like a dozen people on my Live friends list, and I like it that way. Don't add 20 people to my list after I go to bed, and then leave me to find out when teabggerINURFACE877 spams me with messages as I'm playing the next day.



• Don't demand that everyone plays every multiplayer game on the hardest setting when (1) no one else wants to and (2) you can barely handle it yourself.



• You're the only person in the house playing that obnoxious FPS game. TURN DOWN THE VOLUME. Tip: If people four rooms away from you are diving for cover every time you shoot, it's probably a little too loud.



• You have awful taste in games. They're not fun to play, and they're even less fun to watch. Quit bringing your bargain bin crap to my house and then hijacking my system to play them for hours. I feel like I need to give my 360 a bath after you leave. Also my eyes.



• Your long, rambling, outrageous stories about the things you did in games are not believable or interesting. No, no one believes that you beat that one game using only your big toe and got a special "Big Toe" achievement. Or that you unlocked Mario as a playable character. Or that the game developer called to personally congratulate you. Yes, we know you insist that it all really happened, and yet somehow we don't care.

The Red Ring of Overreaction?

"The Red Ring of Death," the Xbox 360 hardware failure caused by overheating, has become the rallying cry for Sony and Nintendo fanboys, anti-Microsoft crusaders, and doomsaying game store employees everywhere. It's also a very real thing.

How real? I bought an Xbox 360 on launch day, and since then I've had five "red rings." If anything, my ring ratio is on the unlucky side, even considering that various surveys have reported 30 percent to 60 percent failure rates around the world (though red rings are reportedly much more rare these days after some changes to the console's internal architecture.)

And yet here I sit four years later still playing and loving the console. Why? Because "red ring" repairs are always free, and even though it was a downer to see those lights each time, I was always back to playing games with a repaired or new console on Microsoft's dime within two weeks.

Not everyone has the same outlook. One of my friends got a red ring and went out and bought a PS3. Another got a red ring and, instead of sending it off for the free repair, cracked the console open and tried in vain to fix it himself - voiding the warranty and leaving him with no system.

The 360, its library of games, and the Xbox Live features are a great fit for the things my family and I want from a game console, and that's the most important thing as far as I'm concerned. To me, that's more than worth dealing with the red rings - only one of which has happened in the last two years.

Still, it's important to be aware that the red ring is real and to take that into account along with the things the system offers when deciding if it's the right console for you. But then it's equally important to keep some perspective if it happens: Do you want to wait two weeks for a free repair, or do you want to turn it all into a giant nightmare by overreacting?

It's just ring. It doesn't have to change your life. Unless you consider a trip to the UPS store a life-changing experience.

This Week's Releases, Top Rentals

It's Monday, so it must be the Zombie Apocalypse. Again.

One of the most eagerly awaited games of the year for action and shooter fans, Left 4 Dead 2, hits shelves tomorrow for Xbox 360 and PC. Xbox Live members got a preview of the game via an exclusive online demo earlier this month.

Developer Valve, of Half-Life 2 fame, scored a major hit with the 4-player co-op focused original by combining the atmosphere of a survival horror movie with the frantic run-and-gun action of a competitive first-person shooter. This is more of the same, but faster, bigger, and more frantic. There are no slow, shuffling zombies here. A neverending wave of them sprint toward you - and toward a hail of bullets from you and your three companions - in a way that looks a lot more like "Saving Private Ryan" than "Night of the Living Dead."

One interesting side note: The story sees its four characters cross the Southeast, from Louisiana to Georgia, over the course of the game. So, yes, the zombie apocalypse will be coming to Alabama.

Other highlights of this week's release list include the hilariously titled New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Assassin's Creed II, Lego Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues, NCAA Basketball 10, and expansions for Wii Fit and The Sims 3.



Top five most popular rentals at Gamefly:


1. Borderlands (Xbox 360)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 (Xbox 360)
3. Dragon Age: Origins (Xbox 360)
4. Assassin's Creed II (Xbox 360)
5. Left 4 Dead 2 (Xbox 360)