About 4 years ago, I bought an original Xbox for two reasons...

1. To play these critically-acclaimed mature games like: Dead or Alive, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, Halo, etc.

2. To join the new online community, Xbox Live. My second departure into online console gaming

I joined Xbox Live about 3 months after I got the Xbox for Christmas. I got the Starter Pack, which included: 1 Year of Xbox Live, A headset, and a demo disc with trailers of new Xbox Live games and a MotoGP playable online demo. MotoGP was the 2nd game I played online on a console, the first was SOCOM for the PS2. MotoGP was super fun, I met a lot of new people, people from around the world and even my dad enjoyed playing Xbox Live with people around his age. Then, I became a Live addict, I constantly bought new Xbox games for the purpose of playing them online with friends. I rarely bought singleplayer games that had no online, thats how addicted I was to Live, I needed to have all the great online games. Rainbow Six 3: Black Arrow, Splinter Cell: Pandora Tommorow, and Ghost Recon 2 were the games I played the most on Live. Then, Halo 2 came out about a year later, and everyone on Live was hyping it. I thought the first game was good, and all my friends pre-ordered it just to play online, and so did I. I pre-ordered the Collector's Edition 6 months before the game was to be released in early November of 2004. A years amount of hype seemed to explode on Xbox Live when Halo 2 was finally released. I was out of school when Halo 2 launched because I was expelled. So, I was there at the midnight launch, while everyone I knew at school couldn't play it till after school ended that day. I was very happy, I felt like I was on top of the world. I got my copy of Halo 2 Collector's Edition, was the second person in line, got home, put the game on my bed and slept till the later morning. I played Halo 2 when I woke up and had another great experience of playing Xbox Live.

I spent the next two years or so playing Xbox Live, with the usual clan matches in Halo 2 and Rainbow Six: Black Arrow, and the usual custom match in Far Cry: Instincts. People loved me, for a couple of reasons. One reason was because I can do a perfect impression of "Ratty" from X-Play on G4, back when it use to be an awesome gaming channel. I remember people use to send me Chat Room invites when I was playing Halo 2 and the like. When I accepted a chat invite, about 70% of the time people would ask me to do the Ratty impression in the chat room, most of the time, the chat room would be filled. I did the impression happily and everyone would laugh and try to do their impression. It was a good time. Soon after, my Xbox Live account shut down. I checked and it said that I needed to pay $50 for the annual membership. I didn't have the money then, and later on, I completely forgot about paying for Xbox Live, one reason was because Xbox 360 was coming out the following winter. I lost most of my Live friends because I didn't have the money to pay for another year of Live.

The Xbox 360 was released in the Winter of 2005. I was too busy playing Doom 3, Half-Life 2, and others on my new computer to notice much. When the 360 came out, it was entirelly focused on improving Xbox Live, and they did drastically. 2 years later, I began to remember all the good times I had on Live, all the friends I made, and all the fun I had. The 360 is getting a very strong line-up of games in 2007, and in the near future, so I decided to get an Xbox 360. I started making a list of what games I needed to get, like a Gold Membership, and Halo 3, GRAW 2, Mass Effect, Call of Duty 4, etc. I went onto Xbox.com and created a Silver Membership, with the gamertag "SoldierIce64" in order to prepare for my re-arrival to Live. My old original Xbox Live gamertag was "HardcorePlayer" just in case you wanted to know. While looking on Xbox.com, I decided to see if any of my old friends were still on Live, and apparently, some of them are. I was so happy to see their gamertags, now all I can do is wait for Christmas to come so I can re-unite with old friends, and possibly make some new ones.

Till' next time - HK