My Opinion on XBox LIVE

In South Africa, we have a pretty big community of XBox 360 gamers. One thing that I believe is keeping this community from growing exceptionally big, is the absence of the XBox LIVE service in South Africa. Microsoft has made a statement that the XBox 360 can still be fully enjoyed as a next-generation gaming console without the service. I beg to differ...

Over the festive holidays, I decided to test this theory by actually getting onto XBox LIVE. How is this done? Well for starters, you need a LIVE account with an address in one of the XBox LIVE countries (mostly people in South Africa use US or UK addresses). Then you just connect your XBox 360 to the internet, link a profile to the LIVE account, and voila! Your on.

"So how do I create a LIVE account?" I hear the noobs asking. Simple. Just head on over to www.hotmail.com and create a free Hotmail account that immediately gives you a Microsoft LIVE passport. Just be sure to enter a US address for the account otherwise your not getting any LIVE gaming done using that account.

Now even before I could even connect to LIVE, I had to download and install the latest update. You can update your XBox manually, but thats a different topic all together. Once you update your XBox 360, its a whole different ball game. You get to create a 3D avatar character which in itself is actually fun to do. The menu is different, and much, much better than before. Its just better you know? (Steers ad)

Then you actually get to the XBox LIVE content. Now this isn't even playing multi-player games on your XBox yet, just the LIVE marketplace and all the other LIVE content. You get to view the latest trailers for the newest games, get access to downloadable content, access to on-demand games (which is playable by buying and downloading a game to your XBox Hard-Drive), gaming news, etc. This was enough to me to hate Microsoft for that statement mentioned previously.

Then I decided to test out the multi-player gaming experience. I would just like to add that the connection I used was a cross-over Ethernet cable between my XBox and laptop, with a 3G connection using Vodafone Mobile Connect, and then set up internet connection sharing using Windows 7 RC. 3G is normally not really that great for gaming because of slow pings, although it proved enough for Battlefield: Bad Company.

From the starting the game I just couldn't put the controller down and played for 4 hours straight before even getting up to check how much bandwidth was being used. It was beyond awesome and took the game to a whole new level. Playing against human players is so much better than playing the campaign over and over again. It was a bit sluggish at times although I'm pretty sure that it would be even better with an ADSL connection and some unshaped bandwidth.

The only problem I do have with this whole setup, and why I haven't played for almost a month, is that you are working with a fake address which I'm pretty sure is some minor fraud, and against the terms of service. Also you can't register your own credit card with the wrong address. This means no Microsoft Points and no money for downloadable content and/or games. Which sucks.

Now a local petition which I'm sure you know of by now, has appealed to Microsoft to get XBox LIVE running in South Africa. Microsoft has replied to this petition quite quickly but said its 100% committed to rolling out XBox LIVE in SA. News24 covered the article here. Unfortunately this was in 2007 already. Its 2010 and still no LIVE which makes me question the "100% commitment" that Microsoft is selling us.

The petition can be found here. If you want XBox LIVE in SA, go sign it. The latest signature was on 1/1/2010. Looks like people are still interested and hopefully this post can drive some more people to it.