The Hidden Blade Assassin's Creed in Depth

Recently a friend of mine approached me with a weekend business deal. He's an engineer and an avid Xbox 360 player like me, and he's one of the people I consulted back when I got my RRoD in November, right during the week of my birthday and AC2's release. Anyway, since the beginning of this year he's been working to make money on the side by fixing RRoDs and E74's on Xbox 360's, and his success rate is literally 100%, with no complaints. He can crack open an Xbox and fix an RRoD in 15 minutes flat, it's amazing.

But now he wants to go to the next level, modding. Recently he's come into contact with a guy in Minnesotta, also an engineer, who happens to be the king of modding 360's and sells modding parts openly to help pay the bills. The best part of it is these parts are next to nothing, and you can find RRoD 360's on Ebay for about $20. He's going to fix them, modify their cooling systems and circuitry, and then put in new lights (maybe even monitors, if this business plan is successful enough). He also said he'd try to research the art of liquid-cooling a 360, kind of like Lilk's PC (which by the way, if you haven't seen it, kicks some serious tail). The problem he has though is that he lacks creative talent, and most of his 360's would all end up looking like 360 Elite's with different lights and a 0% failure rate.

This is where I come in. He wants me to help be his creative designer, and we'll split the profits from each sold Xbox 60/40, which I find perfectly fair since he's doing the real work. I've already got some great design ideas, and I'm also willing to take gaming theme requests. Here's how we figure:

A RRoD 360 costs about $20
Lighting, fans, 360 cases, bolts, washers, etc. around $50-$75
Stencils, paint, art supplies, etc. around $30

So in the best case scenario, it's about $100 to make, and we sell them for $150-$200 to customers in our area for a big profit, or we could even just fix RRoDs and sell them to Gamestop, etc. for about $50 for a small profit.

Some of the themes I plan to work on are pretty generic, while others tend to be pretty complex. Here's a hip-hop concept Xbox 360 that would only require some Gold Spraypaint and a kid's color pallet to make:

Here's a regular 360 arcade with an elite cover on it with some blue lighting. The X in the casing can be made easily with some regular tools, and we can also opt to make the power lights blue as well:

Here's a Gears of War Xbox 360 with some red lighting and another tool cutout. I could also opt to make a stencil and then spray a white Gears Skull onto the cover, the possibilities are endless:

Now here's an example of a complex design. This one requires modeling supplies and action figures, which are more expensive than you would normally think. This one would probably be a little more time consuming for me than my buddy, but the results are still fantastic, and I'm pretty sure people would buy it:

Another Halo 3 themed complex model, my personal favorite out of the ones I've seen:

This model is basically our generic one. We put an elite cover on the 360 and then flood it with green/blue lighting. I then either put a large graphic on the side or opt to cut open the case into a basic design such as this. The little hold at the end of it is where the production graphic goes, which I'm currently designing:

When we're not using Elite cases, we also plan to use A LOT of chrome, it's the 2nd most appealing color to players, apparently:

Here's my final example of my vision. This one is pretty simple: Elite siding with chrome faceplate, painted as Master Chief from Halo: CE, cut open, and then finally illuminated with orange lighting to amplify the visor:

We're gonna begin working this weekend. Luckily, he owns a camera unlike me, so we'll probably take pictures of our work and I'll see if I can post them onto this site. What do you think? Pretty cool, huh?

Hakunamatata,

FLAE