About 6 months ago i bought my first xbox360 after owning a PS3 from its release day. So, yesterday i decided to go on live.
If only I had known what I was about to go through. Just a piece of information to keep in mind during the post, I live in Greece.
To begin with, in order to obtain a golden membership, so that i CAN play online I had to get some sort of prepaid card which is virtualy impossible to
find where I live. I went to every single electronics store around a 10km radius and most of the sellers hadn't even heard of the thing before.
But luckyly i was able to overcome that obstacle thanks to the internet. And so i did, i bought a card online from some site and to my surprise
they didnt steal my money :). So far so good. It is now that i was about to face this ridiculus and irrational system that Micro$oft
has created. After getting the code of the prepaid, I went to XBL then to my acount and then redeem code. I put in the code and BOOM
Information cannot be retrieved from Xbox Live(or something like that) error. But that didn't stop me, I was determined to go online. And because
of that I went to Google. After searchin for about 20 minutes, I found out that the error occured because the country I had registered on my XBL
, United States that is, was different from the country of my Xbox, and since I live in Greece I thought I should just change the country i had on Xbox.com
. Sounds simple. To my surprise even that simple task was impossible to do for some reason. When I went to their website, after looking for 10 whole minutes
in order to find the contact information, I found out that for some reason the counrty was the only unclickable option on there. But that didnt stop me either
. Once again, I used my friend, Google, and kept on searching for like 30 minutes on how to change the country. Apparently the only way to do it was
through my WindowsLive acount which was associated with my XBox acount. Finally, I thought I was getting somewhere...Yea right. Ok so I went to MSN.com
and changed the country on my WindowsLive acount, pretty easy. After that, I went back to the xbox site and of course the country there was still unchanged.
I was getting really pissed out at that time, so much that I thought "maybe it would be easier to just make another acount on XBL. After all, my gamerscore wasnt that much just 1500 or something. And so I did... I created a whole new acount from scratch and a new email, with every piece of information
beeing completely identcal to each other(email and XBL). Ok, I thought, what can go wrong now... Apparently there was something! After spending at least 3 hours trying to
figure it out and then retrying my prepaid code I got this massage saying"XBox live is not available in your Country"...Without much thought, I, once again, searched in Google
for this just to find out that there's actually nothing I can do and that I was at a dead end. But after searching a bit more, I stumbled uppon a post saying that if i actually put in a fake country on my WindowsLive , where XBL is available, then something could happen. Of course nothing did so I changed the country on my Xbox aswell and FINALY they accepted my code!! Great after 7-8 hours of searching and smashing my head on the keyboard I had done it.
Now, to conclude, I'm not saying that Microsoft sucks or anything like this, its just that they have so much bureaucracy that even the most simple tasks are hard to do. On the other hand though I have to admit that the online experience is very rewarding by herself and, in my honest opinion, better than the PS3's.
A few days ago i got a copy of Red Dead Redemption, which is a great game, probably the best i've played this season but to my surprise, the thing i really loved about it wasn't the fancy graphics and the smooth animation, it was the voice acting.I mean its litteraly the first game I have played in my entire life where the characters are so realistic.Besides beeing very detailed in the design, they give the illusion of having a personality.I dont know who's job was to make that work(dialogue writter or voice actor) but they have definately made a great work.My favorite character is Nigel West Dickens who is made by the combination of some very natural animation and the voice of Steve Rimpici. With that beeing said I can finally understand the importance of good voice acting, it can really take the game to a whole new level.
Watch the cutscene in the begining of the video and you'll understand
In 2010 alot of worth mentioning games has been released but only 10 of them made it to my list.Let's go check them out.
10.Star Ocean-because it has an amazing and seemingly endless storyline which kept me interested for a very long time
9.Dante's Inferno-because eventhough many consider it a GoW ripof, i think it has an incredible gameplay and great graphics
8.Dragon Age Origins :Awakening -because its an expansion of my favorite game of 2009, thus earning a place in this list
7.Mass Effect 2-because of the very emerging plot it has and its rpg features
6.Battlefield Bad Company 2-because in a world where CoD is considered the peak of videogames, its nice to see games like this that really ARE good
5.God of War 3 -because of the very intense overall experience it gives to the player
4.Splinter Cell : Conviction-because of the storyline, graphics, sound, animation, .....
3.Red Dead Redemption - because of the vast open world and the out-of-this-world graphics
2.Heavy Rain -because after all these years im really happy to see that the game industry is taking it to a whole new level
1.Alan Wake -because after six years of production and testing, Remedy managed to create a masterpiece.The graphics, the physics , the sound, the storyline...All of them add up to create this tittle which is really a genre defining game and definately a must-have for everyone.
This list regards only the games that were released before May 24.
