Microsoft's Xbox 360 celebrated it's fifth birthday this week, having originally gone on sale all the way back in November 2005 when motion-controlled gaming still felt like a distant dream. The console has been the subject of great praise and also harsh criticism. But despite being plagued with a very high rate of failures due to overheating, Microsoft stepped up its game with a billion-dollar, three-year warranty program to replace any console that got the dreaded RRoD.

Eventually they sorted out these problems with new, more efficient hardware revisions and got away from the controversy almost unhurt. Today, Microsoft is still selling hundreds of thousands of Xbox 360s each month, its console has become a centralized entertainment hub offering far much than just gaming, and with the recent launch of Kinect it still has some years left before retiring to make way for the next round of consoles.

CNet has posted a photo gallery looking back on five years of the Xbox 360. For me it's been a bumpy ride, having to deal with two RRoD problems, which fortunately got covered by the console's extended warranty program. How about you, did you stick with the Xbox all the way through these years? Any launch units still alive out there?