XBox Live

I finally put money onto my prepaid credit card (it's free for 12 months, but you need a balance to be approved/refunded by MS to prove the card works!) and activated XBox Live today. The signup process was kind of a pain - gamepads aren't made for entering serial numbers longer than your average Win2k3 Server CD-KEY! Still, it went by reasonably quickly - 9 minutes to get online, including the time it took me to tweak my FreeBSD firewall to prioritize XBox packets.

My first online experience was with Crimson Skies. I signed in, downloaded the update, admired the free content downloads (new planes, new maps, new game mods - very slick!), and then selected "optimatch" asking for a Dogfight (free-for-all deathmatch) without stats logging (I suck, and wanted to be forgiven for early blunders!). No matches. So, I created a game - 30 seconds later, I had a full server! Less than a minute later, my cablemodem was happily hosting a deathmatch in the skies. As host, I had no lag - and other players weren't complaining or flying particularly badly, so I think they were doing okay too. Voice chat takes a little getting used to, but it's actually quite nice to hear other players say things like "nice!", "that wasn't kind" and so on. The sound quality was very clear, and it was very friendly. I like friendly. The game itself was awesome fun; I came in 3rd (of 6), and really enjoyed the experience.

Anyway, if anyone who reads this is on XBox Live, my handle is MorphicFields, and I'm up to try any game I have.

Talking of which, I need to buy more games. :-)
Mood: happy
Music: Black Sabbath - Wicked World