I’ve spent the last god knows how many weeks trying to review Saints Row 3 but constantly finding I didn’t agree with what I had said about it the night before. Is it too silly, is it too short, is it too shallow, is it not funny enough?
I was wrestling with this when I saw something that made me sit up and snarl, something I can really talk about.
The new Xbox dashboard.
Microsoft released it yesterday at the time of writing and aside from the usual “They’ve changed it so now it sucks” whining from fanboys, people are okay with it…
But you really shouldn’t be!
1. My Xbox is infested with ads.
You have to pay a monthly subscription to use the online features on your Xbox, but that hasn’t stopped Microsoft from pasting adverts across your TV screens for more money!
I’m not normally bothered about ads, I have them here on Unbored after all, but take a look at this diagram here.
The blue area is wasted space, the green areas are buttons you actually use, and the red ones are adverts. Literally three quarters of the page is filled with advertising and I’m not even online yet!
This is like someone at Microsoft watched ‘Idiocracy’ and thought it was a good idea!
The dashboard has a nifty feature where you can flit between different ads in the middle tile, it could have been much better used if it had been for the games on your hard-drive or something, you know, buttons you actually want to use!
I can’t help but feel violated knowing that every time I fire up my Xbox it’s profiting BSkyB, a company that Hacked Madeline Mccann’s mobile phone.
And now I’ve just found that in America the ads are videos that play if you hover over them and can’t be stopped until they’ve finished… I’ll have more on this later!
2. Microsoft leaked your credit card? Guess you’re screwed!
In order to get back online after the update finishes you have to accept Microsoft’s new terms and conditions. Squirrelled away in all the tedious and often pointless legalese is a section that states that you cannot perform a class action lawsuit against the company.
What’s a class action lawsuit? Well I’m no expert but from what I gather, when Sony royally screwed up when they leaked people’s credit card info, the customers banded together to fund a massively expensive corporate lawyer, this is a class action lawsuit.
Sony decided that their mistake wasn’t letting their network get hacked, it was letting people sue them afterwards, and so they quickly amended their terms and conditions to make sure that if anyone wanted to sue, they had to do it alone. Can’t afford an expensive corporate lawyer to match theirs? Then you’re out of luck.
Microsoft have followed in their footsteps before they even leak your credit card, so if someone nicks your account and takes all your money, all Microsoft will do is shrug and give you the finger.
This behaviour is so disgusting that half the states of America are undecided if it should be legal or not!
3. It has loads of cool apps, and none of them are out yet.
Still it’s not all so bad. You can watch Youtube, sometime this winter. And 4OD, sometime this winter. There’s also BBC iPlayer, sometime next year… The only two apps that are out are Lovefilm and Sky. One of them is okay and the other one is the empire of evil.
Maybe it’ll get better as new apps get released, but I doubt the ads are going to get any less annoying.
In the meantime, I’ve taken my credit card off of my account. I know it sounds paranoid, but it’s not such a bad thing when you realise that buying points from Gamestation is actually cheaper than buying them straight from the Xbox.
So to summarise, screw Microsoft, screw their lawyers, screw Rupert Murdoch, and screw the horrible waste of space that is the new menu screen. The Kinect stuff is nice though.
