5… MILLION dollars!

Apparently some couch potatoes are suing Microsoft for over 5 million dollars over the holiday Xbox Live outage. In the cosmos of frivolous lawsuits in which people apparently don’t realize that coffee may be hot and people can be clumsy, or that a rent-by-mail movie outlet would need a time machine to make good on all of their promises… this one ranks pretty low. Next thing we’ll see people suing their power and cable providers when there’s an outage due to massively severe weather saying they should have known the Wrath of God was coming and shielded their connections appropriately.

Still, Tim over at Ctrl+Alt+Del, an actual Xbox gamer, has a wonderful rant on it:

What lives do these people leave that if they can’t get online with their Halos and Calls of Duty that their whole world grinds to a halt? Is their only other option to stare at a wall for hours on end, that it warrants a lawsuit to rectify this horrible injustice? If they can afford a $300 gaming system with games, does it not stand to reason that they could also afford a $15 book?

Of course, a book, silly me. Look at who I’m referring to here, the video generations, with each one lazier and more illiterate than the last, to the point where they’re happy to look like idiots just to avoid the extra millisecond it takes to type/read ‘You’ instead of ‘u’. I mean I support short-hand internet language in the environments where it was bred out of necessity, fast-paced chat rooms and video-games-before-VoIP, where slower typers didn’t have the luxury of full proper spelling and grammar. But these days it seems like this type of communication is all some kids know, and… this is a tangent and a topic for an entirely different rant for another day.

Ok that last paragraph was a bit off topic, but when I go online gaming, it’s the one thing that I can’t stand so Amen Brother! And his statement in the 10th paragraph killed me.

Every time I see good deals on console systems, I always think about the online culture I might have to deal with. Adding an online component to games is great and that Mountain Dew ad cracks me up, but in reality I’ve found that the more MMOs I play, the more I find ways to make the game a solo experience or I have a very limited group of people I’ll play with. I’m really interested in Hellgate: London because they’ve offered a stand-alone version of the game too. While I’m sure it has a different scale of loot, it might be nice to kill an hour or two offline instead of getting sucked into others’ missions or wasting time trying to buy/sell/craft.

Still, I wonder if I can get DC residents to sue Metro next time there’s a train delay for sick passenger. “They shoulda known!” 😛