Xbox Live

For my birthday my sister (Gawd bless her) got me Halo II. I finally decided to try out the free 2 Month try-out for Xbox Live. Gah. Crap. First off it is a pay service. What? Pay to play a game that already costs 60-70$?! I don’t have to pay to play my PC games. B.’s brother doesn’t pay to play PS2 online, but of course Micro$oft wants you to pay to play. (I never really understood why dollar signs are used to replace the S in Microsoft. I know now…) In order to use my FREE try out, I HAD to enter credit card information… and if I don’t cancel in time I’m ‘automatically’ billed for one year of service! Gawd forbid you deactivate the account instead and ASK me if I want to continue the service then give me billing OPTIONS!

Anyway… I finally get on and try to find a CTF (Capture the Flag) game. The interface is bizarre and not like online game interfaces I’ve seen before (and I’ve seen a lot of them). There isn’t a straight forward way to get into a specific game. There was a section called something like Group Team play and the description said ‘focuses mainly on games like CTF’, ok, I’ll try that. I was tossed into an assault game? OK. Played it. Whoopie. Tried to get into another CTF game, nope. Assault again! Meh. So… basically you have to pay to play game types you don’t want to play. I’ll cancel soon. It is a weak service I’ll stick to my FREE online games on my PC. Sigh. Like I need another reason to hate Micro$oft.