The Golden Age

An Xbox game, Halo 2, made $125 million on its first day on sale, which is more money in one day than any other entertainment-based product, such as movies, dvds or music. It made more than Spider-Man 12, more than Star Wars 3: The Wrath of the Whiny Gay Guy, and slightly more than Debbie does Red Deer. These figures have remade the world of gaming, sending the entire industry into a white-hot incandescence of development. Although the 90% rule still applies (90% of everything is crap), the vast numbers of new games hurtling into the market every picosecond mean that the remaining 10% are more than enough to keep most gamers deliriously happy.

Halo 2, Half-Life 2, Prince of Persia 2, Dawn of War, World of Warcraft, KOTOR 2, Far Cry, GTA: San Andreas... it's a veritable season of plenty, no matter whether your tastes tend towards genetically-enhanced super-soldiers, orcs with guns, Sith lords or gun-toting gangbangers. Not personally having a tiny god handy to enjoy the harvest is driving me slightly bonky, but my Xbox is doing fine.

Speaking of which, I'm playing Halo 2 on Xbox Live right this second. Well, not right this second. Right now I'm waiting for a new game to start, with their funky game-matching service chunking away, finding a group of players of my particular skill level, Rabid Paper Bag. I bought the game on the weekend, polished off the somewhat uninspiring single player game, and activated the two month free Live subscription. It still asked for my credit card details, but if you can't trust Microsoft, who can you trust? Oh.

The great thing about this game matching service is that it really lets me get the chores done. Between rounds, I can iron a work shirt, do a few dishes, take out the rubbish, chop up another dead body, all kinds of neat stuff. Kudos to the Bungie development team for dreaming up this cool feature. Now if they can just build a special pedal-based foot controller system, I can really make some progress with my knitting.