Nothing more needs to be said.

Last year was my last year of Xbox Live. Not only because I had no choice to continue, (Cancelled my credit card) but even if I could, I wouldn't want to. The damn thing is a mess. It takes forever to find what you're looking for, and there are barely any filters to narrow down what you're looking for aside from "demos" and "movies".

Now, I may have given MS another chance later down the line when they get their act together, but no, I can't. This brings me to my second point: My account has basically been permanently suspended from Xbox Live due to the infernal boobery of whoever is running the show over there. I wanted to downgrade to a silver account so I could still get any 360 exclusive demos that pop up, but since I let the system take it's course and notice that my credit card no longer exists, therefore suspending my account until I pay up, I can't. Not only can I not access Xbox Live, but when I try to go into Account Management to try and find a way to downgrade to silver, it says I have to be connected to Xbox Live to access that too. Brilliant engineering, MS. Brilliant.

Alright, so now I would appear kind of stuck. I contacted MS "support", as they like to call it. All this is is basically a bot or a very stupid person that copies and pastes template responses based on keywords in your plea for help. Here is an unaltered exert from the e-mail I recieved a day later:

"If you have a credit card renewal set and that card is in decline, you will carry an outstanding balance and will go through the standard decline cycle, not dropping to the Silver tier. In order to drop your Gold membership to Silver membership you need to cancel your Xbox Live account. Please be advised, however by canceling your subscription, you will lose any remaining time on the service in addition to your gamer tag and game rankings."

That's right. They're telling me I have the only solution is to CANCEL my Xbox Live account. This means I'll lose all of my achievements, MS points in my account, and an account I've had since the original Xbox. Yeah. I don't think so. Once again, someone should give a medal to whoever designed this "service". In typical M$ fashion, they didn't even tell me how to cancel the damn account. They want me to pay up, and I'm not going to, especially if this is the kind of ludicrous service I have to deal with.

The sad fact is that M$ is rolling around in money, so they don't seem to care about dissatisfied customers anymore. They seem to think they can get away with a lot more too. (I'm looking at you, red ring of death & 360 failure rate)

It's times like these that I'm starting to believe that people are right: this might be the year the PS3 takes off. I don't want to sound fanboyish, but come on. I have both right next to each other, and any time a game is available on both, I always get the PS3 version simply because it makes more sense. The thing is silent, and installing to the HDD means quicker loading times, not to mention a free online service. I'm sorry, I realize this is somewhat of a shameless plug, but it's just a personal observance of mine. Take what you will from it.

Anyway, that's my rant. I feel better now.

...SEXUALLY ATTRACTIVE. I bought the Gold edition a couple of days ago (Includes the original & Opposing Fronts Expansion), and it's great. I'm really happy with the way the Brits turned out. They're my favourite side now; they play a lot like how I used to try to play the Americans in the original, so now I don't suck. Infantry & Canadian artillery FTW (It's about time someone ****ing put us in a game). I've only played with the Panzer Elite a bit, and they don't really appeal to me, but I do like that they've added an Axis (Panzer Elite) campaign in Opposing Fronts, instead of just having the Allied perspective again. I've done some thinking, and I think it's pretty safe to say that CoH is one of my favourite RTS games... next to Starcraft of course.

Kane from Command & Conquer!

The sun was in my eyes, so I coudn't see where I was going, and next thing I knew, I was in the opposite lane... barely, but enough to scrape with an oncoming car. Don't worry, I'm fine, but nothing could prepare me for what happened next. We both slammed our brakes and got out to examine the damage. As I got closer to the guy, I thought "...Oh my ****ing god, I ****ing hit ****ing KANE. HOLY ****ING ****." The resemblance was uncanny. I had hit a Kane lookalike. We exchanged information and I was on my way. Now I'm paranoid. I keep thinking that I've forsaken the Brotherhood of Nod and he'll have The Black Hand after me.