Problems with only EA sports games freezing - xbox360

[RUiN 427]

I'm pretty good at solving problems but this is actually my little brothers problem and he lives across the country. He is unable to play any of his EA (sports mostly) games on his 360. The symptoms are that the game starts and freezes the box at the title screen. Non EA games of his work fine, DVDs work fine, Live arcade games work fine. He is able to connect to live and everything.

I have a feeling it has something to do with all EA sports games connecting to their servers for the sports news ticker. I also seem to remember having issues back in the day on my own 1st gen xbox connecting to EA servers unless i had registered the games with them and associated them with my gamertag. However that never caused the games to freeze.

His live account is brand new, I bought it for him this xmas. This is all the usefull information i can give you. So the question is... Has anyone else had this issue? If so what is the fix? If not am does my suspicion of EA servers make sense? If you don't know where else can i look?

[Hindenburg]

Clear the cache.

[RUiN 427]

Already tried:
- removing the hard drive
- clearing the cache
- using a freshly created profile

this would clearly point to it being a disc issue and not a server or networkissue. However it effected all the titles at the same time. I am having him try the discs in friends xbox's when he gets back from his basketball game, which should clear some things up.

I am also going to have him try some more non EA games and even non EA sports games as well.

[MisterNoisy]

Does it happen when he is not connected to Live (disconnect the network cable, etc.) at all? The last few EA Sports games I've played download a bunch of crap for the whole 'ESPN Radio presentation' thing when they load and it could be hanging on that.

[RUiN 427]

Does it happen when he is not connected to Live (disconnect the network cable, etc.) at all? The last few EA Sports games I've played download a bunch of crap for the whole 'ESPN Radio presentation' thing when they load and it could be hanging on that.

precisely my thoughts... I'm certain we already did that but it's hard to remember what i told him to do over the phone. I'm going to have him try a bunch of stuff and one of them will be that, i am also going to ask him to let it sit for a long time.... maybe "freezing" to him is actually  5 minute pause that the game does before desciding theres no feed?

i dunno it's all so weird because of no error messages and being isolated to his ea spors games.

It just seems highly unlikely that the discs for FIFA, NHL, NBA, and Tiger are all bad at the same time after being playable only days before.

[fatboy]

I am having the same problem, but only with MLB Baseball.   Madden, NCAA Football, NBA and NASCAR (so far) have all ran fine.  Baseball locks up about every 3 - 5 games.

I am not on Live either.

[RUiN 427]

/facepalm...  i asked my brother how long he let it stay frozen. "about 30 seconds then we turn the xbox off." Knowing his internet connection atschool the game could just be hanging at the begining for a while to update something or ping servers or whatever.

I told him to put a game in and let it sit for a while and go do something else for 15 minutes or so.... hopefully that will work.