Tagged… in the USA…

A year ago, in an uncharacteristic show of generosity, a close friend of mine loaned me his “spare” X-Box 360 indefinitely. Over looking how lucky I was to secure such a deal, this has lead to much annoyance on my part and I’ll tell you for why…

When logging on I found the American market place information, this seemed pretty cool, that was until I tried to buy anything and was given the message “not available in your current location”.

Some time later (when I couldn’t download the Duke Nukem 3D demo!?!), I decided this would no longer do. I went to the X-Box Live website to change my information and found I was able to change every detail apart from my country, which was greyed out and displayed as “United States of America”.

Pausing for thought, I figured this may be because my Gamertag information could be linked to my MS Passport, which in turn was populated by my Hotmail account. I vaguely remembered signing up for a US Hotmail account to get the .com address rather than the .co.uk, but that was in 1998 so memories are fuzzy. Acting on this hunch I went to check it out and change the country if I needed to, which would hopefully precipitate the change I required.

After changing my address from somewhere in Puerto Rico (yeah, I know) to England I checked back but nothing had changed. I tried further times and on several different areas, but no matter what I tried the country of my X-Box Live account never changed. Reluctantly I phoned their helpline and was reassured that many other people have experienced the same problem, usually when moving from one country to another for work or university. “Excellent” I said, “there must be a solution then”. “There is”, I was told, “just start a new Gamertag but put England in it this time…”.

Yeah, and that’s it. End of conversation. No more steps. Just bin your ‘tag and don’t use it again. No transferring of achievements or memberships, no process for keeping your MS Fun-buck$ or downloaded content (although this obviously didn’t apply to me), nope just start again from scratch.

Apparently it’s “Impossible” to change that entry on the database. Being a user of MS Access I can well believe that making anything do what you want it to on a Microsoft database can be unnecessarily hard but also being an IT Professional I know that “Impossible” is almost certainly untrue. As such I have decided to continue my quest to find a way around this.

To be continued…

Tags: Duke Nukem, gamers, gamertag, games, Microsoft, Puerto Rico, wtf?, X-Box, X-Box Live

Gameswipe FTW

Just thought I’d post a quick FYI for all of those gamers that read this blog from time to time.

What I anticipate to be a rather interesting program airs tonight that should contribute to the on-going debate over the health and effect of computer gaming and the treatment of those gamers by society. This particular show should be of most interest to people who like their documentaries with a sarcastically honest edge, as it has been compiled by one Mr Charlie Brooker, he of Screenwipe and more recently Newswipe fame. The televisualation will air tonight at 10pm on BBC4 and will most likely be available via iPlayer soon thereafter.

For those of you who aren’t aware, this also comes as a timely riposte to an ITV “documentary” which went to screen last week. That particular piece of pseudo science, reactionary drivel followed three children over three years, in what was laughably referred to as an “experiment”, to see how these kiddies dealt with videogames in their lives and what affects they might have. Apart from proving that individuals with various social disorders should be wary of the dangers of over indulgence in the electronic arts*, it also displayed the journalistic integrity of a hobo standing an a box reading aloud from an upside down copy of The Daily Star by relating every behavioural problem they could find to avid video gaming. My personal best was 7 minutes continuous viewing, before having to pause again and take deep breathes to assuage my frustration and outright anger at some of the crazy claims and bulls**t statistics used to justify them.

I’d urge everyone to try and watch the above travesty (available here on ITV’s website for a time) in preparation for tonight’s undoubtedly superior observational piece on a phenomenon of our times.

Watch, record or iPlayer Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe or thou shalt be full of lose…

Tags: Charlie Brooker, Daily Star, documentary, gamers, games, Hobo