Fuck you, Microsoft

I've been having a kind of a love-hate relationship with Microsoft lately, thanks to my experiences with their newest console. Even though I owned an XBox, I was a very late adopter, and I never really got on the bandwagon. I only purchased a 1/2 dozen games for the system, and I certainly wouldn't call myself a fan. However, I was quite pleased with my 360 out of the box-- it looked nice, it played nice, and everything, from the case design to the interface design just felt... slick. Now THIS was a system I could get behind. And don't get me wrong; it still does feel slick. But, after a LOT of time spent with it (thanks to Oblivion), the blemishes have begun to stand out. Now, I'm not going to bore everyone with a list of those blemishes here, since they're kind of tangential to what I intend to write about, and the majority look like they'll be addressed with the new dashboard update that should be rolled out by the end of this week (the first of what will supposedly be biannual major updates to the console's functionality and UI). So, anyway, I've been, by and large, pleased with my 360 experience. And then I decided to take it online.

Most of my readers know that I'm generally not a fan of online gaming-- I prefer my multiplayer experiences to be restricted to face-to-face affairs. Rest assured, this hasn't changed, although I feel like this console generation might succeed in finally bringing me into the fold (if not, I may have to abandon the industry altogether, since the winds are very much blowing that way). That being the case, I decided that it was finally time for me to buy a wireless router, allowing me to make the most of the myriad online devices that will soon be part of my entertainment centre (DS, 360, Wii, and possibly PS3). One quick trip to CompuSmart (I also picked up a long-overdue RAM upgrade) and a painless setup process later, and my new router was up and running. That was last Wednesday. Care to take a guess as to when I was able to enjoy this wireless paradise with my 360? Well, technically, never, but I was finally able to get the damn thing online as of yesterday afternoon.

What do I mean by technically? See, I have a very pretty wireless router, and it is presently serving quite well as a mundane router (which I didn't have previously, so the purchase wasn't entirely wasted), but I have yet to test its wireless capabilities. I have no DS games that support wireless multiplayer yet, the Wii and the PS3 won't be out for six months, and my 360, in defiance of my expectations, was not wireless-enabled out of the box. Now, that's not an overly grievous crime, but the price for the wireless adapter is indeed criminal: $120. That's 1.5 times what I paid for the damn router, and over 1/5 of the console's original purchase price, for functionality that I feel should have been available by default, or at the very least as part of the fancy "premium" package that I purchased. So, fuck you Microsoft, you can't have my $120-- I'll settle for a wired 360 until you lower that price to something at least approaching reasonable.

Now, if that had been my only problem, I wouldn't be writing this post. The pricing of that accessory is positively evil, but evil is par for the course when it comes to both Microsoft and the video game industry in general. My computer is a fair distance away from my television, enough so that the sole spare ethernet cable I have can't reach from one to the other, but I was able to make it work by putting the router on my computer chair and stretching the 360<->router and router<->PC cables to their limits. Now, obviously this isn't an ideal solution, but it's an acceptable temporary one, since, at present, I don't need a persistent XBox Live connection, intending to use just the free service at first, for occasional downloads of things like dashboard themes, updates, free demos and trailers (there's lots of neat E3 content available), emulation software for original XBox games, and additional Oblivion pay content. So, I wired the cursed thing up, and tried to take it online, only to be told that my gamertag (Jordiebear88-- long story) had already been taken.

Now, I knew that no one else had chosen that name-- I've ported that moniker around enough places to know that it's NEVER taken, even at such a wretched hive of scum and villainy as Hotmail, which is part of its appeal. So, I concluded (correctly) that the system must have retained the tag from my original XBox, which came with a 2-month free trial that I promptly cancelled after 1.5 months, having used it only to download a single free KOTOR content update. Fortunately, the 360 has an account recovery option for use in precisely this kind of situation. So, I selected that option, and it then asked me to enter in precise information about that account, which I was told could be found in the account management section of my original XBox. Fortunately, I still have my XBox, since I can't bring myself to part with my KOTOR & KOTOR 2 save files. Unfortunately, I've long since run out of A/V ports on my television, so I had to crawl around behind the thing to hook my XBox back up.

So, I powered the thing back up, and tried to access my account management. Oh, apparently I need to be connected to Live to access my account information, despite the fact that all of the information I need is stored locally. *sigh* I only had the one spare ethernet cable, so I had to disconnect it from the 360 and connect it to the XBox. I then tried to access my account information again. Oh, apparently I need an up-to-date credit card to access my account information. *sigh* Well, I was hesitant to provide a cancelled account with fresh financial information, especially since I had to jump through some obnoxious hoops to get it cancelled in the first place (including arguing with an insistent Southern Belle: "Oh, sugar, why you wanna cancel?"), but I didn't see any other options, so I gave it my current credit card. I then tried to access my account management yet again.

At this point it began behaving erratically, demanding that I check for a new message from Microsoft before proceeding, but then saying that I had no messages and booting me off. After a couple of tries though, I finally was able to access my account information. I put the information up on split-screen with my 360, and then began to transfer the ethernet cable back. Oh, apparently the moment that you lose your connection to Live, the original XBox kicks you back to the system menu, regardless of whether or not you're actively using the connection. *SIGH* So, I plugged the cable back into the XBox, and, after a couple more failed attempts, managed to access my account information again. This time, I wrote everything down. Which is fortunate, because every time I've since tried to access the account management screen, I've been denied access and given an oh-so-useful "We are experiencing technical difficulties" error message.

Hoping that I was finally done with all of this nonsense, I powered down my XBox and transferred the ethernet cable to my 360. I entered the information that I'd recorded, and tried to reclaim my gamertag. And wouldn't you know it, it actually worked. To a point. The LAST point, specifically. It made me enter all kinds of personal information and made me set several options (a process which, all told, took about ten minutes), and then waited until the very final step, during a commit of the changes, to give me an error and boot me back to the system menu. The error message was: "Xbox Live sign up is currently unavailable. Please try again later." Oh. XBox Live signup isn't available, is it? Then why in FUCK did you just let me do all of that, you FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR TURD. So, foolishly believing that the error message was accurate, I finally gave up on getting online that night, and waited to try again the next night.

Care to take a guess as to how that next night's efforts went, as well as the next two nights after that? If you said "precisely as fucking infuriating as the first night," then give yourself a gold star. I entered in that goddamn information a dozen fucking times, and also spent some time fighting with my original XBox and the XBox.com website (all of which are connected to the same gamertag database), but all to no avail. Finally, I realized that the error message was fucking lying to me, so I typed it into Google a found a couple of useless threads where people were having the same problem. I tried everything that was suggested there, but none of it worked. Finally, on Saturday night, I'd had enough, so I sent a very long and very precise e-mail to Microsoft tech support.

Yesterday morning, I got a form letter back, telling me that my problem was too complex to be solved via e-mail, and that I should phone their support line and quote some obnoxious 12-digit support number. The reason that I spent all of that time writing the damn e-mail in the first place is precisely because calling tech support is the last thing in the world I wanted to do. Tech support is already evil, so Microsoft tech support must be positively godless. But I had run out of options, so I made sure that the portable phone had a full charge, and settled down for what I fully expected to be a two-hour phone call where some teenager reading a sheet with an accent I can barely understand would painfully slowly walk me through a list of steps that I'd already tried several times and that I know would not work. However, I was pleasantly surprised, as the support call was the one bright spot of this ordeal.

Now, don't get me wrong-- this wasn't a pleasant stroll. It was still a tech support call. It just wasn't too bad as support calls go. There was still plenty of evil afoot: there was an obnoxious phone menu hierarchy standing between me and any actual human assistance, with poorly chosen and ambiguous categorizations; the guy on the other end sounded like he was still in high school and had an almost impenetrably thick southern drawl; he had to ask his supervisor for advice and assistance every few minutes; he periodically put me on hold to bombard me with a mix of loud music and Microsoft propaganda. Also, in the end, he was not able to solve my problem. HOWEVER, he didn't make me do anything I'd already done, and the call lasted all of twenty minutes, so it's already the best support call in history, as far as I'm concerned.

I gave him the support number and described my problem for him, and he was quickly able to diagnose what precisely was wrong. My old account had been cancelled, and because it was still a free account at the time, I couldn't reactivate it, despite the lies my XBox told me, or reclaim it as a 360 account. However, my gamertag was exclusively associated with that dead account. So, I asked him what I could do about that. Roughly fifteen minutes of on-hold propaganda later, with brief breaks when he returned to ask me a question or two, I had my answer: nothing. After lengthy consultation of whatever reference materials he had available, and discussion with the "experts" on staff, he said that there was no way for me to reclaim my old gamertag, either through reactivating the old account or disassociating it, although he was at a loss as to explain "why the fuck not".

Now, this is more of a problem than many of you might think. You see, my MS Passport account (the account used to access Hotmail, MSN Messenger, etc.) is exclusively associated with my gamertag, and such an account is necessary to use XBox Live. So, I asked him if there was any way that I could disassociate that. This also apparently cannot be done for some reason, although god only knows why. So I asked him what I was supposed to do in that case, and he told me to create a new one. Finally, I asked him if, because of my fumblings on my original XBox with my new credit card, I'd have any charges to worry about. He assured me that I would not, and I do more or less trust him on that, although I'll still be watching carefully to make sure.

So, my MS Passport account is locked by a long-dead and short-lived account that I had in the first place only because it was free. I had to sign up for a new Hotmail address, and then use that to register a new gamertag (JBear88), after which the 360 XBox Live signup was as quick and painless as it was likely intended to be. After many hours of frustration and effort, I was rewarded with nothing, and ended up doing something that I could have easily done in a few minutes last Wednesday night, and would have were it not so incredibly stupid. Surely Microsoft doesn't WANT me to have redundant Hotmail accounts, but for whatever reason, that's precisely what I've been forced to do. And now I'm screwed out of their much-vaunted 360<->PC interconnectivity, as the "me" on my PC is not the same "me" as now inhabits my 360, and I'll be damned if I'm going to waste time trying to synchronize the two, or transferring entirely to the new Hotmail account. So, in the end, this all probably only boils down to the fact that I won't be able to send invites and messages from my 360 to people on my MSN contact list using their PCs, which isn't all that important, but it still burns, and after a week of wasted time and stress, I have one thing to say to Microsoft: FUCK YOU.

That's It-- I'm Done

I'll no longer be going to watch anime at the university on Saturday nights, after roughly seven solid years of regular attendance. With Stefan and Aiden now busy on Saturday nights, the prospect of ten weeks by myself eating crappy junk food in a room full of people that I hate, watching shows that run the gamut from mediocre to awful, is simply too much to bear. I've got a list of shows that we were watching, and I'll finish the ones that I liked on my own time. I probably should have stopped a long time ago, but there were three things that kept me going. First, I am a creature of habit, and a stubborn man. I don't like change, and I don't like to stop something once I've started, and anime has, for better or for worse, been a fixture in my life for quite some time. Second, anime night once served an essential purpose-- it was my new show filter, that I used to discover shows I'd never seen before, and there were a LOT of good shows that I'd never have watched were it not for anime. However, through the magic of the Inter-mo-tron, I feel much better equipped to find new shows myself these days, and no longer worry that some gem from the new season will escape my notice.

Finally, anime night used to be a whole lot of fun, and I think that some part of me still held out hope that it could be again. I used to look forward to it each and every week, going to watch shows with 1/2 dozen friends, and then doing other stuff with those same people afterwards, whether it be eating at the Diplomat, playing video games, or watching yet more anime. However, a lot has changed in seven years. I now have much more refined tastes, and whatever crap they elect to put up there for consideration is no longer good enough. And it's been a long time since I had regular crowd of 1/2 dozen people to go with, with most of the people who used to attend no longer living in this city. Also, the place is a wretched hive of scum and villainy these days, full of loud, inconsiderate, and above all creepy people who I hate with every fibre of my being. Where I and my friends used to be happy, we are now miserable, sequestering ourselves in a nearby stairwell to talk for much of the evening, emerging only on those rare occasions that a show of good quality is shown. This being the case, even if I did try to bring someone new along, it's kind of a tough sell.

So, I'm done. I no longer need to be embarrassed to admit what I do on Saturday nights, but now only need to be embarrassed that I'm doing nothing on Saturday nights. I'll no longer need to schedule other events around anime, and I'll now have another night to spend working through my video game backlog. Most importantly though, I'll never have to see any of those freaks ever again.

Aside: I had an awesome idea last week, and feel compelled to share it. I think that there should be a website called professor-or-homeless-person.com, where anyone can upload a picture of a professor or a transient, and visitors can guess as to which they are. I laugh just thinking about it. :-)

On Grammar

Most everyone is in agreement that the names we currently use to describe video game genres are lacking. Individually, they are too broad, lumping together very different games, and yet, collectively, they are too narrow, without a place for many types of gameplay. I've even seen it argued by some designers that these names are actually influencing design, subtly forcing games into a mould and stifling innovation. However, noone seems inclined to do anything about it. I propose a loosely-defined expandable/refineable grammar to describe a game, defined by the following initial debatably-ordered syntax:

[dimensions] [camera] [flow] [pacing] [menu] [players] [player character stat/skill growth]-[instanced player character multiplicity]-PC [setting] [impetus]-driven [opposition density] [method of violence] [impediments and/or required/central tasks]

Each element would have a generally agreed-upon list of possible values that could be expanded on demand. As examples of its use, the original Final Fantasy would be a "2D top-down turn-based speed-independent menu-based single-player combat/acquisition-grown-multiple-PC fantastical story-driven thick-opposition abstracted-violence combat/exploration" game, while World of Warcraft would be a "3D 3rd-person real-time moderately-paced menu-heavy massively-multiplayer combat/acquisition-grown-single-PC fantastical combat/interaction-driven moderate-opposition magic/melee combat/exploration" game, KOTOR would be a "3D 3rd-person turn-based moderately-paced menu-heavy single-player combat/event/acquisition-grown-multiple-PC futuristic/fantastical story/theme-driven moderate-opposition magic/melee/firearm combat" game, Katamari Damashii would be a "3D 3rd-person real-time briskly-paced menu-less 1-2-player acquisition-grown-single-PC whimsical/real-world humour-driven thin-opposition non-violent time-restricted/exploration" game, Contra would be a "2D side-scrolling real-time fast-paced menu-less 1-2-player acquisition-grown-single-PC real-world challenge-driven thick-opposition firearm combat/platforming" game, and Karaoke Revolution would be a "3D dynamic-camera real-time variably-paced menu-less 1-8-player growthless-single-PC real-world embarrassment/challenge-driven opposition-free non-violent singing" game. I think that these descriptors give a good feel for how each of these games are played. I had included information on music and setting licensing, but decided that, since it doesn't directly impact gameplay, it probably should not be included. That would start things on a slippery slope towards inclusion of things like platform, developer, and price.

For the purpose of categorizing/broadening, individual elements of these descriptors could be dropped as the writer/speaker pleases. For instance, the current genre MMORPG would be roughly/debatably described as "real-time menu-heavy massively-multiplayer combat/acquisition-grown-single-PC combat/interaction-driven magic/melee combat/exploration" games. The individual elements, their ordering, and their possible values would all be open to change, removal, or addition via general opinion, or perhaps at the discretion of the publishers. So, what does everyone thing? Brilliant? Obvious? Impractical? Incredibly useless and ill-conceived? Too-verbose way of describing games more precisely than is necessary? Suggestions for further syntactic elements are welcome (and I may update this post with more of my own as they occur to me).

Note: As an aside, this week is my, as Aiden termed it, Christmas 2. That is to say, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, is this week-- an annual event in LA that is the single largest and most consequential source of video game news all year, and a show that I would give up a limb to get a chance to attend. I always get excited at this time of year, and rabidly consume all the news and media. Anyway, rather than spam all of my friends every time something new is announced, which is my modus operandi in years past, I'm trying to restrict myself to a handful of dense posts over on Smiling Politely. So, for anyone interested, my E3 news and impressions will be here.