This weekend marked the start of my immersion into the world of XBox Live, and quite possibly the end of my social life for a while. To paraphrase Winston Churchill; “never has so much fun been had by one person in so few days”.
My XBox Live kit finally arrived on Friday night - I’ve been putting off buying it at least until Forza Motorsport came out because it was being billed as a Gran Turismo killer. My first impressions are that I should have bought XBox Live a LONG time ago.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, XBox Live is the online gaming network that you can (predictably) connect your XBox to in order to play games with real people all over the place rather than just your friends in split-screen mode. While playing the game you can all talk among yourselves with the supplied headset. I was surprised how easy it all was to setup - I just plugged the ethernet cable in from our wireless ADSL router, and (after letting the XBox onto the network), it all… well, it just worked.
Playing Forza against real people is a blast. I started out getting thrashed, but once I got a handle on controlling the cars, and learned a few tracks it was time to start walloping people left right and centre. This has it’s drawbacks though - I took part in several races at Silverstone last night and basically painted the floor with everybody several times - they all wandered off in the end. I will admit it’s rather amusing to hear people wingeing about their car being rubbish… this happened in one of the races where I was winning in an far inferior car.
Anyway - I’ll stop going on about it now
On Saturday night we went out to a “wedding party”. Some friends of ours got married a couple of weeks ago, and they had a party at the weekend where they re-did their vows so that all their friends and family could take part. It was a great night and much fun/drink was had by all. It was also the first time we’ve been out and about since W found out she was pregnant, so everybody kept coming up and congratulating us.
For some reason towards the end of the night the usual idiotic ideas started to materialise. On each table there was a small beany teddy bear, with helium balloons tied to it. We got it in our heads to tie as many balloons as possible to a bear and see if we could send one off across the rooftops outside - but it rapidly transpired that we would probably need to use every balloon in the place… somebody came up with the bright idea of chopping the teddy’s legs off, but then how would he land!?
I guess I better get on with some work…