Console Gaming

    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.