Just to update:
I've ruled out the medium of the discs, as well as the burning itself. Took a friends copy of GTA4 and backed it up with my burner, verbatim medium and produced a back up. He's been playing all day without hitches. Tried giving my console tons of air (playing in a well fanned area without top or bottom on). Tried without HDD, tried clearing cache. I think I covered all the basics.
It must have something to do with games taxing out the system. The two main games I mentioned, GTA 4 and Ao2 seem to be games that would do that. I don't think it's heat related based off of the playing without cover, re pasting my heat syncs, and the absence of the 2 red lights. I don't have an E74 error but I tried the fix for it as stated earlier.
So after all of that, back to step one! I'm out of ideas. Tried google, tried other forums, tried this one...couldn't find anything.