Speaking of newfound friends, I was playing through the single-player campaign in Rainbow Six Vegas last week when I decided to get a little multiplayer action going. I fiddled around in some Team Sharpshooter competitions for a bit when I noticed a co-op game running and decided to jump right in. One thing that you should know about me is that I haven't spent a ton of time with R6V since it came out (though I did spend a great deal of time with it in its preview stages), so I'm not super-good at it. I was prepared for serious verbal degradation from the other dudes in the game, but to my surprise it never came. Instead, we just screwed around through a couple of levels - making jokes, increasing our rankings and shooting bad guys. It was great! It was also made possible by the wonder that is Xbox Live.
If you had told me ten years ago that there would be a service that would enable gamers across the planet to engage in cooperative slayage over the internet, I would have said, "Yeah, PCs are pretty cool." Seriously though, Xbox Live is a remarkable triumph not so much because of what it does, but how easy it makes the previously formidable task of finding people to play online. Even our very own Gerald Villoria has succumbed to a little anonymous online frolicking, as demonstrated by his anecdote in our Game of the Year write-up for Gears of War. This practice of roaming the Ethernet spoiling for a random fight or team-up simply wasn't possible in the console world until the advent of Xbox Live. Sure, other consoles made the attempt, but it was never a sweeping underlying feature of nearly every game available. To be able to quickly and easily hop into a competitive or co-op match is thoroughly awesome, and I wanted to take a couple of minutes to acknowledge that fact before exploiting it (also thoroughly).
I want to plug a new event we have going here at GameSpy: 'Spy-Hunter. For those of you unfamiliar with this new column, it's your opportunity to smear the floor with GameSpy Editor entrails. It's going off tonight, and I hasten to add that it would have been a lot more work to set up without Xbox Live. So, this evening at 7 p.m. PST we'll be playing Gears of War, and I'd like to explain why we're going with that game for some of you that have commented on the issue (yes, we watch you). The bottom line is that Gears is really the only game that all of the participating editors own, and we decided to begin the competitions on 360 because of how easy Xbox Live makes it to create private, invite-only games. As I stated in the flagship column (linked above), we'd like to play a variety of games in the future, but the first few games will most likely be on 360 because Xbox Live is so great... plus, I'm in charge of it and I'm terribly biased.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go play some more of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, because if I don't I might slip into a gaming depression of magnificent proportions. If you've got 800 Microsoft points, I highly recommend nabbing it off the ol' Marketplace, and if you don't have 800 MPs, I suggest buying some just for Symphony. It's that good.
My So-Called Live is written by a very distracted Gabe Graziani who keeps looking over his shoulder, longing to return to his current darling, Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Shoot him an email here or continue to suffer his insane rantings - either way, he likely will be too engrossed in Castlevania to care.
