Half-Masked

It occurred to me the other day that perhaps I was being unfair in my open letter to Gabe Newell, and in fact my review of Left 4 Dead 2. I criticized those who only played online and ignored the single-player content. I said they were “only playing half of the game”.

Well wasn’t I doing the same? I was only playing the single-player content. Until recently, I never had the means to try it online. Now I have.

In fact, if you join Xbox Live today, you too can experience the never-ending anguish that is trying to play any modern video game online!

• -Experience the soul-crushing frustration of being kicked out of lobbies within six milliseconds of your joining!
• -Try to co-ordinate an offensive against skilled opponents, only to lose miserably because your team-mate keeps purposely killing you over and over again for fun!
• -Build camaraderie with absolutely no one, because everyone else on your team rage-quitted. Because it looked like you weren’t completely annihilating the enemy team in the first 10 seconds of a Five Round match!
• -Pay good money just to hear the garbled transmissions of tiny racists!
• -Set up your own custom lobby for wacky times, only to waste away the few precious moments you have left on planet Earth as no one ever decides to join your game!
• -Dozens of levels to choose from, but for some reason everyone only wants to play on the same stupid fucking stage over and over again(FINAL DESTINATION!)
• -Join friends online, except not, because they’re never on when you are, and if they are they’re usually busy playing a game you don’t own until 3 in the morning!
• -Try to have fun, only to realize that if any of the 8-24 players doesn’t have an alien supercomputer from the future, game-killing lag will render enjoyment impossible!
• -In-game downloadable hats! ONLY $15!
• -Somehow avoid all of this bullshit and end up in a lag-free, asshole-vacant game, only to wind up fighting a team of Super-Gods who defeat you so thoroughly, even  the memories of you from everyone you met in real life are erased from time!

Oh boy, where do I sign up?!

My friend let me borrow his Xbox Live adaptor doo-hickey, and we made a new account to see what the deal is all about. It is exactly as terrible as I imagined it would. Do people really pay money for this crap? Yeah, if you happen to magically avoid all of the above, it can be fun. Maybe. But it accounts for 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000001% of all of the time spent on Live. The reward doesn’t come close to making up for the unimaginable torment of TRYING to find that one golden game.

Now do you see why I play the Single-Player content? At least bots don’t rage-quit while insulting my mother for a slow connection on their end. Life is too short for Xbox Live.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 11:35 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.