Why did I bother?

I got a call from Craig at lunch time today. In truth it woke me up, but still, I'd been woken up a few times already by that point anyway. He wanted to play Halo 2 later. To sleepy to come up with a good reason why didn't want to (retrospectively I probably should have simply said "I don't want to") I said yes. So at about 9pm he called and, a while later (it was about 9.30pm, but it seemed like quite a while) we started playing. It was just as bloody awful as I remembered. Hordes of screaming, sub-literate American kids, gleefully attempting to mock you for your accent or kill you deliberately even though they're on your team. Then you have to put up with laggy game play where your efforts are seemingly further hampered by the unfair advantage that Xbox 360 owners seem to have with what appears to be a far more accurate and deadly auto aim, meaning that you die about twice as quickly as your richer (at least their parents are richer), younger, whinier, transatlantic cousins. That's if the Yank kids haven't already quit because they've gone 1-0 down after 30 seconds of the game. In the end the whole thing was starting to wind me up so much that I simply gave up bothering to play properly. In the past I even managed to get so pissed off with the uneven playing field that I threw my joypad on the floor. This would have been fine, the joypad's quite sturdy after all, unfortunately it's connected to the headset, which is nowhere near as well but and promptly snapped as it came off my head.

It wasn't fun. I probably won't renew my Xbox live subscription when it expires in February. I'm starting to think that Xbox live is a major contributing factor towards the rest of the worlds hatred towards America. I really do hope that the miscreants one encounters on Xbox live aren't in any way representative of the US population as a whole.

Craig has an Xbox 360. I'll probably never get one. He's been trying to persuade me to get one. He talks as if it's inevitability. It really isn't.

So, a complete waste of an evening. Sort of. I suppose at least now I know that I'm not missing out on anything good by leaving my Xbox turned off.