XBox Live Gamertag -- XStatic9

I finally got around to buying a wireless router for my XBox (which I might add I purchased over 3 years ago at the full 299.95 price…it is now 149.95)…this one if you’re curious.  The gamertag I wanted (XStatic) was taken, so I had to settle for XStatic9, and I was a bit peeved that the XBox live subscription service didn’t allow for punctuation in the gamertag handle.  It just looks so plain without all the markup I usually do, plus I’m sure I would have eventually found a combination of colons/dashes/whatever to have had XStatic.  Oh well.

The WAP was a breeze to setup, however the subscription registration process itself is a PITA, mainly due to the lack of keyboard.  I had a free 2 month subscription that came with Halo 2, but I was still required to give them my credit card number, no doubt so that when I forget to cancel in 2 months (even though I won’t), they can automatically start billing me.  Bleh.  So far I’m quite impressed though, only had a few laggy connections…for the most part gameplay (on Halo 2 at least) was smooth and trouble-free.  I played for about 6 hours yesterday and managed to get my ranking up to a 5 (meh), but I aim to remedy that over the weekend.  The free-for-all (Slayer) gets a little old after a while, but it’s a good place to start to learn some basic strategy; my favorite free-for-all game is OddBall (fun fun fun!).  The last hour of gameplay, I dabbled in the team scenarios (mainly capture the flag), and that seems to be where the serious action is (as is the case with most first person shooters), though me being a n00b pissed some of the seasoned players off…b/c I have no idea where I’m going/how the maps are laid out/strategy/etc, but that comes with the territory I guess.  Deal with it.

My biggest complaint is that you can’t choose a specific host to stay with and keep fragging the same people, though I’m guessing as I meet other players we’ll start adding each other to our friend’s list and can then set up our own games.  But if you can’t keep with the same group of people throughout a session, how do you know who’s good/sucks/etc?  I haven’t been what I’d consider a hardcore gamer in a couple of years (was very much into Quake3, Unreal Tournie, and CS 1.0), but with the PC games (if you play the same servers long enough) you can really get a feel for other people’s gaming style and strategy…thusly clans are born.  Man, I miss those days.

So now that I’m all gamertagged up and stuff, feel free to add me…hopefully I’ll see you around the Halo 2 game lobbies.  Cheers, and happy fragging.

Sidenote: I’m creating a new post category, Gameage (which I should have done long ago)…it won’t be a very active category initially.  So, this will be the only game related post in the General or Tech categories, just wanted to give those readers a heads up.