Re:PC Online is very different than Console Online (Score 2, Insightful)

let's not kid ourselves. no one i know bought the xbox to play dashboard games or to frak around with the other "content" or bells and whistles it offers. i've never seen anyone play the dashboard games other than secondary users like girlfriends and non-gamer types who are passing the time while the gamer is doing something else. the *only* reason i bought a Live account is to be able to play Gears online and maybe Halo2 sometimes. i'm not interested in anything else MS has to offer and all the logging in, profiling, clicking around trying to find this or that, etc, just takes away from length of my gaming time (which is inversely proportional to my age, it seems). also, i think the Live interface is clunky, counter-intuitive and needlessly bloated, just like most MS products. it's an added insult that we have to pay to simply connect up a few clients over internet to play. Tribes and Tribes2 were both games so much ahead of their times in this respect...the interface told you what you needed to know, had friend management and real-time server/ping updates and was frakking FREE (and i'm not talking about the Tribes2 browser feature nobody used, just the server/game listing). so, in a nutshell, MS has done what corporations are good at doing: inserted a needless layer of crap into an experience that would otherwise still work without it, just so they could charge for it (i say this about gaming and corporate operations, ever notice how big companies insert layers of middle management everywhere to "streamline" things?).