Great Expectations or, "How I can't afford a HDTV you pretentious fuck."

For anybody that isn't aware yet, I'm a gamer. My hobbies and interests tend to revolve around a digital world filled with whatever else somebody has come up with me to explore, talk to, and occasionally kill.

Any hobby is expensive when you really think about it, so any purchase for that hobby generally has to be justified if you barely have the money to support yourself, so when Minecraft (an Indie game originally released in Beta for the PC) was announced for the Xbox 360 I was quite happy, but couldn't justify the purchase as I already had the PC version (which only cost me about £5 by the way).

Then they announced 4-player drop-in/drop-out co-op meaning that all my friends that enjoyed Minecraft, but didn't have a PC or the money to get their own copy on PC, could potentially come round mine and we could have fun building things, exploring a world, leading Creepers up to each other, etc, etc.

So that was the justification. Buy the game for the 360, have fun with friends for countless hours. I saved for several months to put the money aside to get the game when it was released.

The game was released yesterday for 1600 Microsoft Points (roughly £17), and I bought it immediately. My friends sat with their controllers in hand (which they'd brought themselves, not purchased by me), and waited patiently for the game to load up and for co-op fun to begin.

There was no option for me to have co-op. All the settings were there, but whenever I tried to invite anybody to the game, it couldn't be done.

A quick jump online lead me to THIS forum thread which in turn lead me to the tweet below from the developers:

So, hang on...I need an HDTV and component cables to be able to enjoy this in splitscreen with my friends? I don't remember reading this in any of the official advertising or marketing:

Yep, there we go, it says Offline co-op 1-4 player, but no mention of needing an HDTV to be able to play it like that. Usually something that important will be noted, like when a game needs you to play online to access the co-op, see how they note you need to be online to play 1-8 player co-op?

Needless to say, I complained about it. I've complained to the developer, I've complained to Microsoft, and I've been interviewed by Kotaku.

The developer didn't respond. Microsoft said they won't give me a refund. The Kotaku article lead to many people saying I need to get myself out of the stone age.

In response to 4J Studios:

This annoys me, mostly because it wasn't advertised. You have your reasons for not letting SDTV owners play splitscreen, but perhaps you should have also mentioned it in the advertising. The vast majority of people I know don't own a HDTV, and cannot afford one, so as far as I can tell you're blocking out a large group of possible customers. Like I say, that's fine, but some warning would have been nice.

In response to Microsoft:

You say you can't give me a refund because the game works fine. It doesn't work as advertised though does it? I don't want my money back, I just want my points back so I can purchase a different game that I can enjoy with my friends.

The Kotaku out-rage:

Believe it or not, there's more of this all over the comments section. People that seem convinced that money grows from trees, that having different budgets means you're lower than them, that not having the latest gadget means you're an idiot.

Is it genuinely hard to believe that it takes time for someone to save up enough money to treat themselves on a cheap game? Why? We're going through a recession, we don't all have jobs.

Why do these people seem convinced that it's ok to lord this sort of behaviour over other people? If my friend doesn't have the latest gadget, I don't laugh at them and say they're an idiot, I just ignore it, forget about it, whatever.

The main purpose of my complaint was that a game that I had saved up for, planned on buying for the big selling point (splitscreen co-op), was not advertised as requiring something else to play it. Like I've said multiple times, if I had known that it needed an HDTV, I wouldn't have bought it.

If I had a good job, I'd just go out an buy a HDTV, but I don't have a good job. What little money I have has to go towards more important things, and the one treat I get to pick me up when I'm feeling fucking miserable enough as it is? Can't play it properly.

Community reaction?

"Get a HDTV you jobless bell-end."

Thanks guys, thanks alot.

Have a good day.

Stumbling Around

It's now been approximately a year since I completed my Journalism course at University, almost 5 months since my graduation ceremony.

I am still unemployed.

At the moment, I feel like I am stumbling around with nothing to do. I am getting more and more depressed as time goes by, becoming less and less enthused about any application I hand in, any CV or Cover Letter I send off, or even any job that I find.

In the past year I have applied for jobs that I am qualified for, that I have trained and studied for, and that I have a real interest in doing; but at the same time I have also applied for any job that I felt that I could do, cleaning positions, positions with local stores or coffee shops, I've even been looking at care positions in my area (you get a fair amount of money for doing what should come naturally to most people, looking after someone, being there for them, etc, etc).

In that entire time I have had two interviews, both of which have gone nowhere.

I was overly optimistic for the first few months out of University; happy for the break from essay writing and interview sourcing, but looking forward to finally getting my hands dirty with some real life journalism (even if it did mean just getting the real journalists some coffee or tea while I wrote the obituaries and fluff pieces).

I have considered becoming a teacher (either in English, Religious Studies, or Media Studies), thought about joining the MOD's media section, and seriously considered putting an application into the Armed Forces, I am this desperate for something to do.

My wife (Lindsey) found a blog that inspired me to write yet another entry, it's about the 5 stages of UNEMPLOYdenialMENT:

So forget grief a second. (And the running… my legs are on hiatus) Here I am, four months post last exam, every day I basically do the job of a broadcast journalist at a very nice, local radio station. But I’m not paid, I have no written agreements and I can’t afford to move out of my mum’s house. It’s a strange and unnatural state, this unemployment. And I’ve come to view my own experiences in five phases – not so much the stepping-stone progression stages like the Grief journey, more like a haphazard cycling of which lottery ball is going to spurt out of Lancelot today…

 The rest of the entry can be found HERE, it's worth checking out because it's amazing how true it is...especially that she's a writer/journalist like myself.

But this entry isn't the only thing she's inspired me to do, she's also inspired me to get a bit more active on the writing front and hopefully get in some other writers for this blog. I have a hopeful for America, but I'm equally interested in writers from elsewhere, as I know for a fact that I am not the only writer that is out of a job.

On top of this, I recently started writing a new short story which I hope to group together with a bunch more and start selling for the Amazon Kindle, nice and cheap and to earn me a bit of cash AND recognition (here's hoping it isn't shit).

So yeah, I'm stumbling around at the moment, occasionally falling into pits of happiness and inspiration, and I think my cycle of unemploy-denial-ment is coming back round to optimism...maybe.

Either way, finding a job may not be looking up...but I'm trying my best to find things to do in the mean time.

Have a good day.