The Great Pit of Carkoon

MY six year old and I have spent many a carefree hour with Lego Star Wars II on the XBOX 360 over the last three months or so.

He plays and I "drop in" from time to time on the second controller, or consult the strategy guide if he comes across a particularly intractable problem.

It is a great way of killing some time on a wet, cold winter weekend afternoon.

Now, although the Profit Burglar and I have had a tinker with XBOX Live, when it comes to the 360 I am to all intents and purposes a mug punter. Compare and contrast PCs whose software - as an MSCE etc. - I tend to tune and configure continuously and without consciously applying myself to it as a separate task at all.

I was therefore ill-prepared for the troubles that awaited us in the Great Pit of Carkoon yesterday when, for all the ordnance we loosed at it, we couldn't destroy the left hand rotating target and send Jabba's sail barge crashing to its doom in the Tatooine desert

Googling the predicament led me to a New Zealand forum that suggests that this is a bug that can be cleared either by turning on adaptive difficulty or downloading an update. Though I've no idea how to try either of these at the moment, I'd be surprised if they turned out to be beyond me.

It is salutary none the less to learn first hand how frustrating something like this can be when you come across it as a plain vanilla customer rather than a practitioner.