Had a couple of real annoyances with my shiny new Xbox 360 over the last couple of days. Number one; I bought a 120GB hard drive from eBay for it which arrived the other day. Installed okay and seems to work fine, however it appears to be completely impossible to transfer my saved games from the memory card that came with the console to the new hard drive. All I get is a silly ‘sharing’ error message. They’re my save games, damnit!

Number two; Online play. I’d signed up for an ‘Xbox Live Gold’ account when I got the console, at a frankly scandalous £5.99/month to enable me to play online against others so I expected the service to be top-notch. How wrong was I? Since getting the console, on the 30th December, I have been completely unable to play against anyone online.

I’ve played online games on the PC for donkeys years – going back as far as playing Duke Nukem 3D across a 28k direct modem connection to mates. In recent years, of course, the connecting conduit between players has been the internet – and Xbox Live is no different – but online play in most PC/Mac games is a complete doddle. Just look at the likes of Counterstrike and Unreal Tournament – you just fire ‘em up, hit multiplayer, and connect to a server. You’re away and being fragged in no time at all. I expected that this newfangled polished ‘Live’ service would be all that, and a bag of chips. It’s not.

The actual account registration took a few dozen goes before it worked, and the game finding or matchmaking service just appears to plain NOT WORK. Xbox Live has something called ‘TruSkill’, which apparently looks at your playing stats and matches you up with someone with a similar skill level – so you don’t get matched up with someone who’ll pwn you into submission. A neat idea. If it worked. It just doesn’t match you up to anyone. Or, if it does, when you try to connect to each other, there’s an error, or the console locks up and you have to reboot it. So far, I’ve managed to get into a ‘race lobby’, once in Forza 2. That’s it. Never even saw a racetrack!

I tried again tonight, using FIFA 2008 – an EA game, which contacts and uses EA servers, not Microsoft ones – and it was similarly disappointing.

On the other hand, I did get round to downloading a HD trailer for Will Smith’s latest flick, “I Am Legend”. Wow. Ohwowmywowflippingwow. I realise I’m probably the last person on earth to actually see HD content on a 1080p TV, but – wow – it’s an even bigger step up from DVD than VHS to DVD was. Of course, I’ve seen higher resolutions on PC and Mac monitors for years – but not at 37″! It really, really does look fantastic, and I can’t see it being long before I break out the wallet and end up with SkyHD. Sigh.

My cold now appears to be down to just two things now – the nausea and the cough. The runny nose has gone, as have the headaches. I still haven’t actually been sick, though I’ve felt very close to it a few times today.

Aimee woke at an ungodly hour for a Sunday and point-blank refused to sleep, despite it being pitch-black outside, no matter what crafty tricks Emma tried. I’d gone to bed late on the Saturday night, so was particularly grouchy at 7am, and I think Emma’s just really, really missing the concept of a Sunday morning lie-in.

By the back of 11, Aimee is tired and ready for her mid-day nap, which gives us an ideal opportunity to take down the Christmas decorations, and have a general tidy-up after the festive period. The Christmas tree, if I’m honest, is looking a bit past its best – I think we’ll have to start making more of an effort at Christmas-time for Aimee’s sake, and a £9.44 (3 years ago!) tree from Asda probably isn’t going to cut the mustard this time next year.

Emma’s mam and step-dad pop in for an afternoon visit, which makes us doubly glad that we’d tidied up before-hand! Emma whipped up a sausage casserole and some bread and butter pudding double-quick which went down a treat. I really don’t know where this recent burst of enthusiasm for cooking has come from, but I know one thing – long may it reign!

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