Wireless broadband soaking my house in invisible, deadly wi-fi rays, I found myself finally making full use of my sputtering, neglected Xbox 360. We had a fraught little affair over Christmas, I muddled through Fallout 3's investigate rad-lands, the 360 breathlessly expelling delighted wheezes. Following that I tried to spice things up with some of EA's sci-fi magpie dress-up Dead Space. It didn't last. The tryst unravelled when I found something toothy in the garden. I hadn't prepared myself for that. Sad little 360. All alone with DVDs and Blu-Rays piled high on top. Why ever should I play you? Wireless broadband! That's why. Finally I am able to steal gameplay from thin air! This was just too good an opportunity to pass up. Besides, if my testicles were to rendered inert and useless by all the invisible information floating around, I might as well have fun. From the comfort of my own bedroom, I can finally reach out and touch anyone else in this big wide world! And by touch, I mean 'murder a high resolution avatar of, with bullets'. Exciting, heady times!
Obviously Microsoft is not in the least bit inclined to make this service free. Quite apart from the annual subscription fee, there's the small matter of coaxing your system into receiving signal. PC and router three feet away? Wicked! Just run a cable. Stuck at home leaching off a family set-up, rooms away? You'll find yourself investing in £60 worth of wireless adaptor. There are other options, but in the end I decided I valued ease of use at a premium. Unpacking the limp dongle, I was struck by how little effort had been made to make it seem worth the investment - this is in non-connect isolation of course, otherwise it's a window into a world of uninventive slander - vacuum packed into Microsoft's regulation lethal plastic death-trap, once liberated all you're getting is the clip-on plastic chip, and two brief black and white booklets. Value for money!
Installation's easy enough, but zoot alores! The updates! In theory my 360 is about three years old. It's the second actual machine, but the hard-drive is vintage 2006. Having took the off-line route for so long, minor updates issued sparingly with brand new titles, I wasn't privy to Microsoft's Mii copycat Experience. What wonders awaited me! Like the 360's functional blade slip and slide? Up yours bud! Here's acres of little video windows that lead to dead-end coin shills. It's maddening. Fool that I was I expected a years old xbox.com tutorial on keeping offline achievements to get me somewhere. It didn't. It seemed to be working up to the point where I was presented with a screen that in no way corroborated my step-by-step printout. Options I required were nowhere to be seen. Curses! Luckily, the tutorial did steer me away from simply overwriting years of gameplaying, leaving me with a brand new online account, seperate from my offline one. User friendly! Time sink weathered, I was ready to go!
If, for some bizarre reason, you want to be my phoney Xbox Live friend, feel free to spam friend requests to TheManFrowns. If I like your gamer name, you're in! Be warned though, my online tastes haven't quite evolved past Call of Duty 4 yet. Left 4 Dead's lying about, so that'll get thrown on eventually, but right now I'm all about running headlong into eighteen months worth of practiced children, each and every one screaming frenzied racial epithets into their headset mic.
Web 2.0!
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