So, got the game and collected roughly over 35 hours. Reached new vegas did a few quests on freeside and the strip then left. Came back and the black screen pops up every time I try to go in through the freeside. Went through Camp Mcarren with the train to the strip and after leaving the building that takes you to the strip the game freezes every time I approach the door to the Main Strip to get to the lucky 38.

After that I read here that some people installed it on their HDD and it fixed the freezing issues so I installed it, loaded it up, walked to the door that leads to the other part of the strip leading to the lucky 38 and BOOM....froze again.....

So after paying $80 damn bucks for this game expecting it to be as good as Fallout 3(over 120 hours on that beast) I cant even play the game.

If you guys have any solutions for this dilemma please feel free to respond.

There's about 100 topics explaining the fix for this, but I'll try and be helpful even though you're too lazy to search.

This a known glitch to be fixed in the next patch, but essentially a workaround is to get the "Old Cowboy Hat" (sold at Mick and Ralphs, also somewhere in the Old Mormon Fort as well). Wear it while on the strip and you'll be able to enter without issue. Any other freezing will be coincidental. It's all related to how you completed the "Debt Collector" quest (you killed McCafferty).

The game isn't "Unplayable", you can't go into the strip. If it were "Unplayable" it would freeze when you put the disc in.

No, it's not, really.

I actually killed McCafferty in Debt Collector and it works just fine for me. If that's the worst problem you have, then you're really not doing so bad.

I talked him out of his hat .. seems to be a pretty good workaround if your skill is up there and you feel you need to do the quest. Save often and these glitches become nothing but minor annoyances.. You can back track to where the glitch came from by loading up older saved games, discovering where the glitch no longer takes place and doing something different to bypass the glitch. It's a sandbox game and if you've played one before you should know how amazingly glitchy they can be. Especially on release. Just get used to saving.. in different slots, keeping permanent saves that you can easily go back to. I like to make a permanent save right before entering any major town. I then make saves I don't plan on keeping for the whole duration of the game before I enter any door and before I talk to any main character. If nothing happens after a few hours of game play then you can go back and delete those ones. Over saving has been a habit of mine since F1/F2 ,Baldur's gate era games. And oversaving on Console games is even more of a must.

This reminds me of Daggerfall - glitch and bug galore! What I don't understand is why the problems on the console? The XBox 360 is a closed system - hardware and OS don't change and all the consoles are the same (different hard drive sizes), so it must be sloppy programing or poor project management, as there is really no excuse for a commercially sold product to perform this poorly. I guess they wanted to hit the Holiday sale time, but damn, they really shot their foot with this release!

I installed to the hard drive and I regularly delete the system cache when screens start taking too long to load or I'm getting dropped frames. Frame drops almost always lead to a freeze so I quit and reload when it begins to happen.