Setting Aside: XBox

After a year or so of daily playing—with a few weeks here and there of not playing—I'm setting aside my XBox to focus on important things. But not without telling you about which games I'd been playing on it.

Other than Halo 2, which I gave up after being slaughtered during online play, I bought NHL 06 and won the Stanley Cup with the Vancouver Canucks. After that, I bought Burnout 3 on Adrian's recommendation. That game has time trials (fun enough), takeout mode (where you rack up the number of competing cars you make crash or spin out) and races (which combine takeouts with time trials). Though they seem necessary to advance in the world cup, there's a crash mode, where you hurl your car into traffic and score cash for the damage you create. Boring.

I ended up buying NHL 07, but it's just too much like NHL 06 for me to want to take the Canucks to their second straight NHL championship.

The latest game I bought was FIFA 07, partly because I like team sports games, partly because I had played it before and liked it, and partly from seeing my brother and my cousin play it in Iceland. I started with Manchester United, the team I always choose (people make fun of me for them being my favorite team, but I'm at peace with my decision) but subsequently got sacked for losing in my first cup game. The manager I created subsequently got hired by the New England Revolution, and lost in the semi-final of the cup. (I made the playoffs but I'm giving the game a rest for a bit.) Solely because of my success with the team in a virtual environment, and until next year when there's a team in the league based in Canada, the Revolution are my favourite team in Major League Soccer.

(There's something about the Ridiculous Hour that brings out the fluff posts. Not that National Blog Posting Month has been a resounding success in the quality department, at least not for this weblog.)