Tweak It Til It Hurts!

Xbox put out a new dashboard update today. So far, all it's done is make my life more difficult.

It only took a minute to download, but after the system restarted, I got to stare at the "Xbox thinking" icon for at least six minutes. The icon prevented me from viewing anything on the Marketplace, Xbox Live or Games dashboard blades. I could still access features in the music and system settings. It's been quite a while since I intentionally cycled over that far.

After waiting around the aforementioned six minutes, I wandered off to do some laundry. So I'm not sure how long the update really took to resolve itself. But things eventually came back to a state of workingness.

So now you can view the friends list of your friends, to help bring out the stalker in those too lazy to stake out real homes. Or you can opt to block the list from public access. If most people turn on the list blocking, will Microsoft do away with the feature?

And at first I thought they did away with the demos I had downloaded, as the selection was no longer on the Games blade. But actually they just mixed the demos in with the Arcade games I have on my system, make them bothersome to find. I went ahead and deleted all the demos I had because I have enough games to scroll through already.

That's all I've expressly noticed so far. I hope some people are enjoying these lifestyle upgrades!

Sharing My Personal Bubble With Bigass Corporations

It's not very comforting to know that I'm paying fifty bucks a year to share my gaming information with who knows who.

I rented "skate." a few weeks ago, played it a bit... never really got into it because of its unusual controls and lack of automatic motion.

I finally logged into my hotmail account which is tied to my Xbox Live Gamertag... which I otherwise don't use. Usually I'm just there to clean out the inbox ever month or so.

There among the Microsoft newsletters and viagra spam was an email from EA, thanking me for registering my copy of skate with them.

Um, yeah. You're welcome.

EA will probably take this as an agreement for them to set up a facility on my lawn.

However, they did send a game tip:
To execute a Coffin, hold both grab buttons and the brake button at the same time.

I didn't even know there was a brake button. I never went fast enough to use it.