Abandon Hope All Ye Who Enter

I usually consider myself an optimistic individual, especially when it comes to video games. Reading forums almost seems like a masochistic thing to do to yourself these days. I’ve never seen such huge groups of cry babies and snobbery all in one place. Its unapproachable I always say. Why involve yourself in something as silly as console flame wars?

Console wars aside, I've actually think Microsoft needs to get their act together. Let’s rewind a bit and turn back Time to the beginning of this mess.

About a year ago I decided to jump onto a more presentable email for professional and business reasons. As I’ve made the transition from teenage gamer, to responsible dad with family, I’ve made some accommodations for them and myself. As I began to use my primary email, I eventually changed the email associations for everything from newsletters to twitter updates and video game account passwords. There was no reason to log in to my old email anymore. Unfortunately, Hotmail has some kind of login detail that isn’t obviously apparent. Emails tend to go dormant after a certain amount of time which isn’t such a big deal if you weren’t using it but this little important piece of damning information would prove to be more than a big deal.

Xbox Live gamertags require a Windows Live ID to be linked to them. In order to recover your gamertag anywhere, you log into your Windows Live ID. In order to change to a brand new hard drive, you need to recover your gamertag onto that hard drive. In order to bring your saved games with you, you need to log into your Windows Live ID. You can even change your Windows Live ID through the Xbox 360 Account Management page, but to do that, you need to log in to your Windows Live ID and there lies the source of my problem. My dormant Windows Live ID means my email doesn’t even exist anymore. One would think there has to be a simple fix to the solution but it goes deeper. Major Nelson released some information about this known issue which is explained here -------> http://majornelson.com/archive/2009/02/19/windows-live-id-s-and-gamertags.aspx?PageIndex=4

So it’s been over a year since they’ve “been looking into the problem.” A year too long I say. Here is why. I am currently on my 3rd Xbox and looking into a 4th. My first console crapped out and flashed the dreaded Red Rings of Death. They sent me my second console, a “refurbished” console which would, from time to time do little things like CORRUPT MY SAVE FILES. I’m talking about it even corrupted my gamertag somehow and had me recovering it every so often. I needed to make some changes fast. The 360 Pro version was only $300 at the time and the Elite at $400 or $450? I forget. So at the time 60 gigs was way better than 20 and way more affordable. I jumped over to the 60 gig, gave my 20 gig xbox to my nephew and recovered my gamertag.

At the time I wanted to transfer everything from my 20 gig hard drive and at the time there was only 2 ways of doing it. Buying the official $30 memory unit, or using the free transfer cable. I called customer service and went with a free transfer cable. The instructions warned me that anything I had on my current hard drive would be erased. I hadn’t started any major games so I decided to do it. The process was pretty simple, pop in a disc and connect the cable from the USB to the hard drive. About halfway, the process displayed an error. I tried it again 4 times and still nothing. Luckily, nothing was erased from my 20 gig or 60 gig. I called their customer service again and they explained the cable might have been malfunctioning. 5 weeks and 3 transfer cables later left me in the same position. I started to do some research on the internet. Why weren’t the cables working? It couldn’t have been coincidence that the 4 I got just happened to be broken. It turned out that the cables only worked from a 20 gig to a 120 gig hard drive. I sure as hell wasn’t going to drop another $400 for an Elite, or let alone a $100 for the single hard drive (although ironically I would totally pay that right now). So I decided to wait, and decided I would buy the $30 memory unit when I got a chance and transfer my saves over.

Months later my email becomes dormant, and I lose the ability to transfer anything onto a memory card because game saves are attached to your gamertag and to move your gamertag or any of those saves, you need to log into your Windows Live ID which is impossible for me because it went dormant! So I settle again and say ”oh well”, I just can’t recover my gamertag anywhere, big deal. Well little did I know I wouldn’t be able to do a lot of things. I can’t play Mass Effect 2 properly because the save is stuck on my 20 gig hard drive. I won’t be able to see the choices I made come to life in the sequel which is a big thing for me because no game has ever done that before. I wanted to participate in a memorable moment of video game history. I also can’t continue playing the 90+ hours I sunk into Oblivion or 40+ hours I sunk into playing GTA 4. I can’t activate any skulls on Halo ODST because I passed Halo 3 on my 20 gig hard drive. I would have to pass the game again just to unlock skulls to get achievements etc etc.

So I have come to accept that I wasn’t able to do any of that until 3 weeks ago when my 60 gig hard drive started crapping out on me. In preparation for Halo Reach, I wanted to finish ODST and get ready for the Beta. I even jumped back into the multiplayer after spending a lot of quality time with Modern Warfare 2. So there I was, jumping back in when the game starts to lag BAD. It was unplayable. I restarted the console and the loading times for everything were annoyingly slow. The console takes forever to start, the games take forever to even get to the opening menus and Halo multiplayer was unplayable literally. I couldn’t join any games. I played Battlefield Bad Company 2 just fine online but the loading times literally take about 5 minutes, before, after and in-between games. I’m literally against the ropes here when I start pondering and decide to recover my wife’s gamertag on the old 20 gig hard drive. With the approval of my nephew I borrow his hard drive and start playing some Halo Reach. Switching hard drives should be the least of my problems because that’s why they made them detachable right? Wrong. Somehow, my wife’s Fable II save from the 60 gig hard drive was corrupted. We figured maybe it was causing the console to slow down so we deleted it. A few days later after reaching my 46th hour in Dragon Age, I save my game and went to bed. The next day, low and behold, my Dragon Age file is now corrupted. I was livid. From my presumptions the problem might also stem from switching hard drives since I would switch hard drives to play Dragon Age under my gamertag, and then switch back to the 20 gig to play the Reach beta. I connected the dots and figured out that the same thing was happening to my 20 gig the first time I was switching back and forth to my 60 gig when it was still new and that’s why I was quick to get rid of it for fear it would happen to my 60 gig hard drive. What a sucker I’ve been.

So now I’m determined to fix this Windows Live ID problem once and for all because I want to put my saves on the memory unit I have owned for a couple of months now and reformat the 60 gig hard drive. Oh yeah forgot to mention halfway through all this I eventually got the memory unit but it also didn’t work because, you guessed it, you need to log into a Windows Live ID. So I scour the internet again and decide that I need to have a talk with someone who might know something at Xbox Live customer service. After hours and hours of talks with different people, it turns out no one knows anything at xbox live customer service. The last guy actually helps me out a bit and suggests taking it up with hotmail because, after all, it’s their email that isn’t working. So I call them up and hit yet another brick wall. The “nice” lady tells me I need to start a post in some sort of self-help thread in their FAQ knowledge database. I fight to speak with a manager and after being on hold for 10 minutes she claims that her supervisor is too busy and said that he would just refer me to the same place.

Defeated and tired of waiting on hold and all day literally, I decide to post my problem in a nutshell. Currently, I am awaiting a response from them but have been waiting over a week for someone to reply to the thread, and I imagine that’s how it’s supposed to work? So I sit here waiting….waiting….waiting…..

And I begin to think to myself…..how I never had this problem with my PS3. I started to compare the two. I am still using the first PS3 I purchased on day one and I have never had any problems with it. I was also able to transfer over both my PS1 and PS2 game saves using a $20 adapter. Nothing would get deleted if I did. I even purchased digital PS1 games and used the saves that I transferred from my old memory cards to start where I left off. The way I see it, my appreciation for the PS3 has grown significantly. I already finished Uncharted 2; I recently purchased the God of War collection, God of War 3 collector’s edition, Heavy Rain, Killzone 2, Little Big Planet and just finished sinking 30 hours into Final Fantasy XIII. Hell the service is free to play online, and I use it as my primary hub to watch movies since it plays Blu Rays. The hell was I thinking worshipping the 360 as my primary means of multiplayer fun?

I’m forced to make changes that I have spent over a year denying to myself. And as pissed as I have been about this ridiculous jumbled mess that Microsoft and Xbox have created for me, I have been having a lot of fun making it up with my PS3. I plan to abandon most of my attachments to the 360 and will only use it for first party exclusives and arcade games. I might have to eventually do this on a new console with a brand new gamertag and abandon my 20k gamerscore. My only regret is that I purchased a total of 16 Xbox Live Arcade games that I won’t be entitled to anymore after this. This includes Braid, Castle Crashers, Shadow Complex, Battlefield 1942, Geometry wars 1 & 2 and other important titles that I am sad to even think about.
So what have I learned from this lesson? PS3 has got your back. Hell, it only does EVERYTHING. Thanks a lot Microsoft.