Ho Ho Ho Merry Christmas Xbots!
Boy was Micro-Claus good to us last year huh? Seems that while the holiday season of 2007 was fantastic for Microsoft they might have underestimated the load placed on their servers by all of the new Xbox Live subscribers, leading to outages that continued well into 2008. But that’s okay, because nothing says sorry like a thoughtful gift, right? Wrong.
It was rather annoying having Xbox Live almost totally out of commission during a time when gamers look forward to putting in solid days of time wasting with their friends on XBL. So when the service went tits up Microsoft knew something had to be done to make things right. Did they offer a free month of service to replace the frustrating weeks of outage? Nope.
Instead, renumeration came in the form of a ridiculous Arcade title that most of us haven’t touched since we opened it. The gift wrapped turd was Undertow, a wholeheartedly boring underwater adventure that seems to be the offspring of Defender and poop. While many of us have forgotten about this internet pothole, it plopped into the countdown at #18 in our top 100 moments of 2008 because we, like most of you, would rather get nothing for our inconvenience than further insult to injury.
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Just out of curiosity, if the happened Christmas ‘07, why is it a moment of ‘08? Was the game released in january? I forget.
I think Microsoft gave the game out in Janurary.
This annoyed me back then and it annoys me now. As reliable as Live is most of the time, when it does go down, people expect to be given something. What really annoyed me was that for two weeks or so of downtime, people were expecting a refund of some sort, which, while it would work for MMOs, would be pointless for Live, especially since most people probably pay for it by the year (Since the month to month price is ridiculous.) Would you REALLY want a refund of around 5 dollars or so?
And look at it this way. At least you didn’t have to PAY for that stinker of a game.
Sure Kira, you have a good point.. But at the same time, people DID pay for soething that they COULD NOT GET. So it makes sense to do something to make up for it. COme to think of it I guess this game is about on par with the value of the time lost. About a dollar.
At least they did SOMETHING though, as opposed to not acknowledging it, so it could have been worse.
I’m not against people wanting something if something breaks, but in Live’s case, a refund of sorts, which is what some people called for, would have been silly. They probably saw Undertow and said “Well, let’s give them this and shut them up.” In some cases it worked, as people were satisfied that they got SOMETHING.