XBox 360 - XBox Live Gold? What's so "Gold" about it?

Do you know where I was on September 24th at 11:59pm? That's right, standing outside Gamestop like a good Halo fan. It was my duty and it was my honor to be there when it hit the streets.

But I'm a family man.

That means I did the responsible thing: I went home, put it on top of the television and went back to bed before one am. (I did however call in sick for work at 6 am so I could play. Again, duty, honor, all that crap.)

Do you know where my fourteen year old son was at four o'clock that same morning? Playing Halo 3. He got up two hours early to play. How industrious of him. I can't get him to use an alarm clock, but for a video game he will. Whatever, that's beside the point.

The point is that he hijacked the H3 on-line profile. Since someone (I suspect M$ put Bungie up to this) changed the rules you can't have more than one player profile in XBL any more, only a primary, all others must be signed in as guests. Those guests have to use a generic avatar unless they want to change their appearance every damn time they join the primary. This sucks, all the achievements I make in the campaign and on line are applied to his profile.

Also I didn't catch on to what was happening until I beat the entire game with his profile, so now it appears as though he Finished the Fight.

No, he most certainly did not Finish the Fight.

Now I have to go through the entire game on Heroic again. I'm tempted to say screw it and just tackle Legendary. I don't really see that going well, it could take a month or two.

Also, I'm an adult so this may sound childish, but on the rare occasion I play on line I would like to use the Elite model, not the Spartan. It's a matter of personal taste, see? If I want to use the Elite model I have to change his profile every damn time, then change it back when I'm done. What the hell? I didn't have to go through this with H2.

Also, he's pretty good at video games so he's going to be level 23 or something ridiculous while I'm playing at level 8. When I log in I'm going to get my a$$ handed to me by other level 23 players and it will NOT be fun. I didn't have to go through this with H2 either. The only redemption this offers is that when he comes back from a weekend away his account will have fallen due to my lack of skill and he'll have to re-build it from level 8. Ha ha.

Why would they do this to me? I spent a disgusting amount of money on the system, $60 for the game, $60.00 for my OWN controller, rechargeable batteries, $50.00 for an online XBL Gold account... the list goes on.

Holy sh1t that's a lot of money spent for me to not be able to choose the way my character looks, don't you think? That's alot of money for me to have to pay to have my a$$ unfairly kicked around a digital make believe environment, don't you think?

Why would they do this to me? My son figured it out, smart kid:

Yesterday I bought a thirteen month XBL Gold account extension and after the boy re-activated our account I was complaining about all the above while he was smashing Warthogs full of unsuspecting suckers with the Gravity Hammer. He must have gotten sick of my bitching because he stopped, turned to me and said "Well I guess you'll just have to buy your own account, won't you then?"

Wise ass, huh? He's right though, that's why theyr'e doing it. In honoring the true, black, cancer ridden spirit of M$ they want still MORE of my money.

Sweet, frickin' sweet.

Forge - Yay or Nay?

Wow, that's all I can say. Well, "wow" and "It's about damn time".

Unreal and Half Life have had editors available to the public for years, even Quake came with it's own editor all those years ago. Granted, no other console game I know of has ever given the end user this much power, and there's only so much manipulation you can expect someone to get out of two bumpers and triggers, a D-pad, A B X and Y, a select and a start button, but I think they should have given us this in Halo 2.

I guess Bungie had their reasons for not doing this sooner. Maybe they were trying to protect the integrity of their product, which I certainly don't blame them for. Have you ever seen some of the crap that gets thrown together and called a "map" in the UT franchise? Ugh. How many times have I wasted three minutes of my life downloading a piece of garbage map hacked together by a thirteen year old that bothered me so much that I maliciously hunted it down and deleted it from my hard drive myself because I was so offended by it that I couldn't bear to wait thirty days for the program to clear the cache?

Too many times, friends, too many times.

It's a double edged sword, I want content, GOOD content, which I know the public is capable of generating (Have you seen some of the UT 03 and 04 maps out there? There are maps created for free by the community that surpass anything Epic employees ever did for money.) but I don't want crap. Maybe now that the trilogy is over they could release an editor for use on the PC that we can create maps and mods with and then load to our XBox 360's. Now that the trilogy is over we won't be able to besmirch the quality of their content. If anything we may look back and say "that game was great until people started making their own maps, then it went to the dogs.". And no one would be able to hold Bungie responsible for it.

I'm already hungry for some new maps, I would like to have Warlock back in particular. I HOPE Forge will help level the field against those kids that play eight hours a day. If the sniper rofle, sword, shotgun, and rocket launcher are moved around the rest of us might have a small chance at surviving against these freaks of nature that memorize every stinking weapon location on every stinking map.

So sayeth me.

new Halo 2 maps

Downloaded the new maps for Halo 2 last night. Both are nice adds to the mix, but Tombstone is by far the superior map.

Tombstone makes incredible use of the three dimensional space. There is hardly a cubic foot of space on the map that isn't used. Much in same the way that Turf and Terminal have a gazillion ways to get from one end of the map to the other. Except that the middle of the map is a killing floor, whether your on the ground or on the catwalks. At least the floor has some cover. Weapon placement is genius too. The rocket launcher spawns with LOS on the overshield spawn. The energy sword spawns just a lunge away from the sniper rifle. And the ambient sounds and secondary visual effects are most choice.

Desolation on the other hand already feels a little old. It's a symmetrical map, great for objective games, as I can attest after a 20 minute game of Classic CTF. Also makes decent use of the space, but not with creativity of Tombstone. But then I guess symmetrical objective based maps are generally kind of simple. It is essentially an over-sized Warlock, but with a fully connected upper level. And I think it's even bigger than Foundation, but with two bases instead of four. That's the real let down. Four-way Assault on Foundation is absolute chaos, but it won't be balanced on Desolation.

A downside to both maps is that they don't support vehicles at all. Both are smallish enclosed places, very much the "arena" feel from Unreal Tournament. But I think you could make a Warthog work in both maps. Ghosts would be fun too. Just looking for mays to keep the maps fresh. Warthogs on Foundation are ridiculous, but sometimes you want ridiculous every once in a while.

Tombstone is right up there with Turf, Terminal, and Ivory Tower on my list of medium to large maps. Desolation is just a super-sized version of smaller maps. I'm not that bigger is better in this case. All told, it's definitely worth the $4 for the pair.

See you online.