Lately, as an Xbox owner and a general fan of Microsoft's gaming efforts, I cringe - a lot. I cringe when I hear stories like the one about the gamer who (probably foolishly) sent an Xbox that was signed by a number of game industry figures to be repaired, and got it back sparkling clean - sans all the marker work. Or the recent episode of the Video Game Outsiders podcast where Kyle said he wanted to get rid of his 360 and all the games because he was so frustrated that he couldn't renew his Xbox Live Gold membership due to simultaneous console/website/prepaid card issues. Or all the complaints from people who can't get purchased content relicensed to work properly on the "new" consoles they got back from repair. Or the recent rash of problems cropping up when folks use the gamer profile recovery feature on their consoles. Or Microsoft's own consoles crapping out in the middle of GDC. Or even the news when Microsoft delighted indie developers by cutting royalties for XBLA games published directly through them. Or the massive Xbox Live outage of Christmas 2007 - which still seems to haunt us sporadically in late February. You get the point.
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Today marks the beginning of Lent , and instead of pretending that I meaningfully celebrate this pre-holiday period, I have instead decided to give up my recent writing laziness and take this opportunity to start a 40-day series of thoughts about improvements...
We just got back from our local midnight Vista launch event. Despite the event being "for" Philadelphia, it was actually held at a Circuit City just across the state line here in Delaware. Apparently it's a really busy store. They had some dubious music...