The Social Wonders of Xbox Live and the Internet (Part One)

Without actually checking back (yes, I’m feeling lazy today), I’m pretty sure it was around four and a half years ago that Microsoft turned console gaming on its head with the introduction of Xbox Live (XBL). For those that don’t know, XBL heralded the introduction of mainstream online multiplayer gaming on video game consoles. Before this, online gaming was solely the property of the PC gaming community and, like most things associated with PC’s, doing it was a complete pain in the backside.

I certainly dabbled once or twice, for a game of Quake, Quake II or Half Life, but there was no sense of community and it was a haven for the keyboard (or headset) warrior. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the experience, but it lacked that certain something that made you come back for one...more....go. Additionally, you were pretty much restricted to first-person shooters and strategy games – the two genres the PC excels in, due to the responsiveness of the mouse and keyboard combination.

XBL gave Xbox users a unique ID, known as a gamertag, and access to a friends list so you could play with people you enjoyed playing with (unfortunately, there are still a fair few idiots out there and I daresay there always will be). As the original Xbox was released after the Playstation 2, which, by now, was dominating in the market, there was a lack of decent games on XBL when it was first released. The biggest sin was that the flagship Xbox title, Halo wasn’t XBL compatible.

I signed up and received my software and headset (for my Birthday if I remember correctly). Excited about the release, I hadn’t counted on my shyness to play a big factor. My interest soon waned and I stopped using it, preferring the safety of the single player experience. Fortunately, this was relatively short-lived as a visit to a friend’s house introduced me to Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six 3. Having never really been that excited about the squad-based shooters before, I found myself actually having fun, even if I was still a little quiet (although that might have had more to do with my state of mind at the time).

I quickly went out and purchased RS3 and Top Spin (unsurprisingly a tennis game) and got back online, with a new gamertag, which you’ll see at the top right hand side of this very blog. I immediately started having more fun and, with the release of Pro Evolution Soccer 5, I became hooked. Certainly, as far as the football is concerned, I won more games that I lost. Of course, there were many more games than just these and Crimson Skies and Halo 2 were worthy of a mention (the latter of which I still occasionally play online).

However, XBL for the original Xbox was still mostly a rough diamond. Microsoft moved it up a gear with the release of the Xbox 360. Here, XBL was more central to the whole ethos of the console. Multiplayer was practically an essential mode for all games released, and you could quickly access your friends list and see what they are playing with the press of a button. I personally love this feature as I guess I must have some hidden voyeuristic tendencies hidden deep down. There are many more features to XBL that I’m sure I’ll go into at a later stage, including the financial bane of my existence, Xbox Live Arcade!

Until then, I’m a happy sort of chap, I can score 30-yard screamers in Pro Evolution Soccer, I can go ‘all in’ on a hand of Texas Hold ‘Em (admittedly without really knowing the rules), I can pick off an attacking opposing team player with a sniper rifle in Rainbow Six Vegas or I can accelerate into another corner too quickly and end up going backwards on Project Gotham Racing 3 and spend the next 20 minutes playing catch-up while veering from left to right down a straight while cracking up at the process. As you can see, it’s not the winning, it’s all about the taking part.

Admittedly, I’m still fairly selective about who I talk to on XBL, but, as the companion piece to this post will show, when you look at the ‘before’ and ‘after’ aspects of my personality, I underwent a fairly significant change in the process.

See you on Live sometime!

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STOP PRESS (eh, what press?)

As I was composing this blog piece, Microsoft finally announced the release of the Xbox 360 Elite – and the worst kept secret in the history of the videogame industry. A souped up version of the current 360 premium, it’s a black console (for heavens sake, why?) with a black wireless controller to match. It has a 120Gb hard drive and an HDMI port which is supposed to run quieter than the current 360, which, admittedly, puts the engines on some small light aircraft to shame. Let’s hope that whatever tinkering they’ve done inside puts an end to the dreaded three red lights ‘ring of death’ that has meant a trip to the menders of many an owner’s 360.

No news on a UK release date yet (as far as I know). As a gadget freak, of course I want one, but seeing as I don’t have an HDTV and am likely to own one for the foreseeable future, I’ll probably go without.

Cue a video marketplace release date for the UK meaning a larger hard drive is essential.

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The Power of Three

Friday March 23rd finally saw Sony throw their fancy next generation hats into the ring with the release of the Playstation 3 – some four months after the obviously more important US and Japanese territories. This is not the first time that Europe has been let down by Sony and, well, let’s face it, it’s not going to be the last time either.

To see in this momentous date in the history of videogames, Sony pulled off a bit of a PR stunt up in London whereby it dished out free £2,000 HDTV’s to 100 or so lucky punters at Virgin Megastore in London. To avoid lawsuits from chavved up teenagers flattened by the sheer weight of all the gadgety goodness, they also all got a free taxi ride home. My initial thought was obviously, “bugger it, why did I have to go and break my time machine?” However, I then felt sorry for all the people not being lucky enough to live around the corner from the London Superstore who just had to settle for a measly Playstation 3 console. That’s potentially some seriously miffed customers Sony!

Still, it’s on the streets now, at the princely sum of £425 of your English pounds (without any free games, an extra controller, etc). By all accounts, almost a week later, it’s still freely available in practically any shop you would care to walk into (although don’t blame me if the shop assistant in ‘Cat-Astrophe’ the pet shop gives you a funny look if you try to get one there).

On a forum I frequent, and certainly since the release of the Xbox 360, I’ve been fairly critical about Sony in the run-up to this release and I still think that £425 is pricing a fair few out of the market, for most of us that don’t really want a Blu-Ray player, thanks very much. Most of the launch games are already available on another console and Resistance: Fall of Man, Sony’s shiny white beacon of a launch game has suffered from average reviews. The online side is light years behind Xbox Live (although the recently announced Sony Home looks interesting). I firmly believe that software will make or break this console and Sony will need some fairly decent tricks up its tweed-jacketed sleeves throughout the rest of the year.

Titles such as Singstar, with a fairly hefty catalogue of downloadable content and the forthcoming ‘Little Big Planet,’ recently featured in Edge Magazine show there is certainly potential and that Sony still knows its market and realises that innovation (and not just graphical updates of its big PS2 sellers – hello Killzone) must come with every jump to a new platform to ensure the market does stagnate. After all, Sony isn’t the new kid on the block anymore.

Regardless of this partly negative blog post, the closer the launch has gotten, the gadget freak in me can’t help but want one. The technology cabinet, divided into four under my spectacularly non-HDTV has a spare space and I think, no, I’m pretty darn sure it’s been calling out to me to fill it.

Now, where’s my screwdriver and wrench, I’ve got a time machine to fix!

Miserabilism and a Shining Light

It’s been a week or two since I last posted, I’ll admit. From a day-to-day perspective, not a lot has been happening in all honesty. I’m becoming increasingly disillusioned at work and in all frankness I’ve had enough of the journey. I’ve started looking for something new as it’s making me utterly miserable coming to work every morning. I’m at the point where I would pretty much take anything if it would mean I was closer to home than I am currently.

Last night was a good case in point. W had to stay late at work and she rung me on my train journey home to let me know. I could do nothing in respect of picking up B, meaning she had to stay with the childminder. I see very little of B as it is and this is by no means W’s fault. I feel so frustrated - if I was somehow closer, I could pick her up in the evenings and spend some much-needed time with her. I know W would be much happier with this arrangement too. We both feel really guilty about the lack of time we spend with her and I certainly feel that I am missing out on some important stages in B’s development (more later). To top this all off, I dashed off the train and sprinted to the bus stop (as it leaves almost right on the time my train gets in). The doors of the bus closed as I approached and despite my frantic knocking on the door, the driver decided to ignored me and pulled away – in doing so, exercising the very little power this man has in his life. My head drooped, dejected and miserable.

The weeks really do seem to last forever and the weekend flies by and is over before you’ve even had a chance to appreciate them. More worrying is the fact that, after 5 months in this new job, I’m already beginning to feel like I did on a Sunday when I was at my old place of work after 4-5 years. I was at my last job for 8 years, which just illustrates the poor physical and mental state I was in at the time. I was suffering from depression and had practically no ‘get-up-and-go’. In the end, it took a redundancy to finally get me to move on and then it took me six months to find the job I am in now. I absolutely won’t let a lack of drive stop me from being proactive and finding myself something different this time around.

On the plus side, it looks like W’s contract at work is going to be extended until the end of May, which is fantastic news for her and from a financial perspective for us. Although it is tiring, she loves the job and would love to be able to stay full time. I wholeheartedly support that last statement.

In addition, B’s development seems to be going from strength to strength. I am so proud of her and I pinch myself (figuratively of course – I’m a wuss, it would hurt with the sheer volume of pinching I would have to do) with how amazing she is. Just before I met W, when life wasn’t great and I was at my (un-diagnosed depression) lowest, I didn’t think I would meet a significant other, let alone get married and have children with said person. I doubted I would be any good at Fatherhood so have surprised myself completely. This has not come as much of a surprise to friends and family though and especially W, who always knew I would come up trumps.

I always looked at the phrase ‘to love someone so much it hurts’ with a huge dollop of scepticism, but here I am feeling exactly that way about my wife and child. Which I guess is why it’s so tough being so far away from them both. Anyway, I seem to have drifted somewhat.
B has developed somewhat of a 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 27th gear with regards to crawling. Before, her attitude to crawling was on an ‘only if I have to’ basis and even then it was a commando shuffle rather than a fully-fledged crawl. Now, you can look away for a fraction of a second, look back and find her undoubtedly with her head and hands in something she shouldn’t have. Also, from out of nowhere, she has decided she wants to stand up now and what surprised us both is how quickly she took to it. None, of this ‘attempt it for 3-4 weeks and gradually get better’. B had it licked in the space of a weekend easily and she’s already taking her hands away from what she’s holding on to and hovering for a number of seconds before crashing down to the floor, chuckling about it and setting off again.

As W said, “Dear, we need to get the baby gate up!” We’ve already had to drop the cot as one morning last week, W went in to find her standing up, leaning over the cot and grabbing at pretty much everything on the storage unit next to her. B had a development check last week and everything is fine. She is perhaps a little heavier than she should be, but nothing to worry about. The Health Visitor said that she thinks B will walking within the month – wow!
Movement isn’t the only thing she’s getting better at. Her vocabulary is growing at an astonishing rate. As long as I live I don’t think I’ll ever forget the time when I took her from the living room to the bedroom to play on the bed. She proceeded to chew the frame at the end of the bed (quite a delicacy I’ve heard in Baby circles). We had been playing the “Where’s (name of baby)? There she is!” game for a while, mostly using her blart rag (I’ll explain some other time), our hands or an item of her clothing.

As she was tucking into her second course of bed frame, I said “Where’s B?” However, I never got around to finishing the phrase, she did it for me. sure, it wasn’t as clear and concise as someone older might say, but there was absolutely no mistaking it. My jaw dropped to the floor, for what seemed like an age. I called out to W (who was still in the living room). She heard it too and I imagine she had much the same expression as I did.

This certainly wasn’t the first time B has impressed us and there’s no doubt it will be the last either. There’s no question that she’s smart. I almost wouldn’t be surprised if I came home today to find B doing the housework whilst reciting Shakespeare, bouncing up and down on a space hopper and making the cats levitate. If pride manifested itself as the colour green, I would have people stopping me in the street every five minutes asking me if I was Lou Ferrigno.

So, signing off for now. In conclusion, I quote from the top of this very page, ‘From a day-to-day perspective, not a lot has been happening in all honesty.’ I worry for the data storage capacity of the internet if things get busy for me!

Currently listening to:

Maximo Park: Our Earthly Pleasures
Air: Pocket Symphony
The Delgados: Hate

A World Without Music

Picture the scene, a cold Monday morning after a stressful weekend where W and I would much rather have stayed at home thank you very much. As mentioned in a previous entry, B had gone to stay with her Gran up in the big smoke. This didn't go too well with either of us as we both felt a little under the weather and we both missed B like crazy. To top it all, we both had to go and see 'The Lion King', a musical we wouldn't even send our worst enemies to. It felt like torture and by the end of the whole day, the fake smile on my face was beginning to look a little plastic. In fact, I think the only reason we both got through it was by making jokes about it.....'Circle of Strife' indeed! A packed train journey home and an absolute soaking on the way back to the car topped it all off nicely. Sunday night had its filthy little claws into us and I could certainly hear the faint cackling of Monday morning, already expectantly waiting and ready to pounce. There was no escaping it - no matter how hard the struggle. The weekend had passed too quickly and we were not happy about it!

So yes, Monday morning - the sort of morning when, by dragging yourself out of bed feels like you have accomplished a great deal. I had breakfast, got changed, made my way down the stairs and out the door (via a very nice goodbye kiss from W - the best part of the day). Fumbling in my bag for my bus pass and mp3 player as I made my way to the bus stop, something didn't feel right. It felt a little light. I convinced myself it was nothing - another incident of my shockingly poor start to the day.

I got on the bus, somewhat baffled by the fact that the Oyster card still said £1 credit, even though I was convinced that was what it said on Friday when I had carried out the same task. I sat in my usual seat, surrounded by the same vacuous faces and begun a more thorough inspection of my bag. The cold hard truth soon hit me:

"Oh bugger!" I thought, "I've left my mp3 player at home!"

Now, to some, that probably won't seem like such a big deal. It's only music, right? Well yes, but for the journey I was about to undertake and when you consider how much music means to me (future posts will reflect this and go into much more detail on the subject). I tried to convince myself that it wasn't a big deal. After all, I had a copy of the paper and the Su Doku would keep me busy (bugger, it's Monday - they're dead easy on a Monday). I thought I might take in the sights and sounds of the journey and reflect on them on these very pages. After all, every cloud has a silver lining and it was good to reflect positively on a negative experience. What follows just goes to show you that the silver lining in my specific cloud was obviously knocked up by one of those cheap, imitation places that shady looking chaps sell out of a suitcase on the corner of seemingly every shopping centre in the UK. So without further ado, meet the people who share the misfortune of accompanying me on my journey to work:

1) An obviously lonely old man gets on the bus two stops before the bus terminates when it would be just as easy to walk it. Most times he gets away without paying and proceeds to witter on at the bus driver about something or other - this morning football was the topic of choice. I don't know why this irritates me so much. I like football and I know if I were in the same position, I would welcome such charity. However, I'm not and so for the 50th time (or something), I contemplate writing to the bus company to tell them their drivers are letting passengers on for no fee. Infinite Lives, the scrooge of the internet!

2) The guy who talks too loud on his mobile phone, without a care in the world. Yes, I know we've all met this guy. However, when you can't blank out his inane ramblings and commentary about which stop he's at now one by one all the way to Horsham, it becomes a completely different matter. I'm just thinking how thankful I am that he doesn't go all the way otherwise I might have to rip his ‘mobee’ from his grasp and flush it down the on-train lavatory.

3) The Chelsea fan. An oldish guy, obviously a workman, wears a beanie hat and several Chelsea badges to go with the daily trawl through the sports pages of the Sun - not even of the intellect to read beyond them. Once the sports pages are done, it's onto his copy of the Official History of Chelsea book recently released. Well, Mr Ibramovich has obviously spent too many pennies in the transfer market so it's time to make poor working class fan pay the price by purchasing this obvious cash-in, shamelessly redesigned and released with the new club logo on it. My how I despise Chelsea! Mourinho I don't mind though - seems like a nice guy. Unfortunately, it's not the latter on the train sitting opposite me when I have no music to listen to.

4) School/College kids. The absolute bane of my journey, even when I can't hear them. Mostly, the train doesn't get too crowded, but somewhere after Horsham and culminating with an onslaught worthy of the final battle in 'The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King' when the train stops at Littlehampton. To think I was once one of these jumped up, self-centered know-it-alls makes me shudder with fear. No, surely I was never this bad. I couldn’t have been. They stare blankly at each other, sit on the tables, chuck random bits of rubbish at each other and smoke without a care in the world and in complete ignorance of the ‘no smoking’ policy. I only wish I were joking. So today’s subjects for conversation were the cheap holiday to ‘Lanzargrotty’ that a group of three girls were going on. They looked forward to meeting and shagging boys, sleeping in, meeting and shagging boys, idling around the pool, clubbing and last (but by no means least) meeting and shagging boys. Oh how I envy them!

This was only rivalled by the young chap who sat opposite. For the best part of three stops (20 minutes), was trying to convince his mate to jump in some river or other without any clothes on. My, how I prayed for leeches, really clingy ones at that!
Really, I could go on, but I may fling myself off the top of the building through the sheer desperation of it all. It fills me with fear and dread that I am bringing my little girl into this world. Obviously, a huge chunk of that statement is said with my tongue planted firmly in my cheek, but there is certainly a part of me that is fiercely protective of B. So, the morale of this story for me is to check, double check and triple check that I have my mp3 player AND sufficient battery power to last the whole journey. The day ended well, with a very nice girl at work lending me her iPod for the trip home. It was a really nice gesture and just goes to show that there are decent people out there if you look carefully enough.

Currently listening to: Nothing (sob).

Mother Dearest

My Mum turned the grand old age of 60 recently - quite an achievement. Possibly not, when compared to the stories you hear (with alarming regularity these days) of people surpassing 100 years of age and still base-jumping off Tower Bridge. Still, I am immensely proud of this feat my Mum has reached and I love her to bits. We're not one of those families who are constantly hugging, kissing and professing our love at the drop of a hat. That doesn't mean we don't love each other and wouldn't throw ourselves in front of a car if it meant another family member would be saved. We're just a little more, refined (for want of a better word) about it.

Without going too much into personal details (after all, this is my blog, not hers), my Mum had a fairly tough upbringing, one of 5 siblings in a fairly working class background (she was by far the favourite member of the family for one reason or another). She has worked exceptionally hard to become very successful in what she does, taking time off on three separate occasions to raise me and my two Brothers, while my Dad worked to earn as much as he could for us all. I think how difficult and stressful it has been in B's first year - now multiply that by three! Still, I may still have all this to 'look forward' to.

As teenagers do, most tend to rebel and cause problems and I was no different. My teenage years were tough on me (or so I thought - terribly self-centered, teenagers) and almost unbearable for my parents. I got caught shoplifting on two occasions and, certainly the second time, the look on my Mum and Brother's face when they came to pick me up from the Police Station is something I will never forget - I'm sure if you asked my Mum, she'll probably never forget it either. Late nights out without calling, breaking curfew times without any sort of notification (these were the days before mobile phones remember). It actually got to a point where to guarantee I got home, my Mum had to come and pick me up from school.

Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing and if I could turn back the clock and do it a lot differently, I would. Now, I am a lot older and a lot wiser, with a child of my own, I can't help but think about how I will fair as a parent to teenager(s). I certainly have a lot of life experience to take on before then as, quite frankly, at the moment, I think I will probably fail miserably. Fingers crossed that B is more like her Mother than her Father as a teenager.

Despite some fairly traumatic ups and downs, my Mum and Dad seem happy and contented as they move forward into their retirement years. They have three lovely Grandchildren (although W and I both hope the next one is a boy - it would be lovely to continue the family name beyond my generation) and despite them losing all their parents at a relatively early age, I really do hope they go on to live healthy and happy lives way beyond when they give up work.

For the last part of her Birthday celebration, we're all (B-less of course) heading off to the theatre on Sunday to see 'The Lion King.' I'm not hugely big on musicals, but then it's not for my benefit. I'm sure I will enjoy it thoroughly and who knows, you may even get to see a review on these pages in the coming weeks. As long as my fantastic Mum enjoys it, who gives a damn!