A well crafted failure

[wossname]

Some failures are so well executed that they not only impart a deep sense of disbelief and irritation, but also a profound feeling of disappointment in the nature of the universe.

One such event occurred this morning. I begin to play a game on my XBox 360, a promising one on paper at least. And after about an hour of playing through the interesting tutorial, watching the surprisingly good special effects, being impressed by the voice acting and the MOCAP, and finally getting quite excited about the prospect of getting utterly enthralled in the game... it crashes as soon as the first real level is over.

"The disc appears to be scratched or dirty" - XBox hangs and needs to reboot.

I'm a seasoned gamer and I realise that this is not usually the end of the world. However I was mildly aggravated by the small but significant fact that THERE IS NO BLOODY DISC! -- this game is an "xbox original", downloaded from XBox Live.

Damn and damn again.

I almost had to put my pipe down, that's how angry I was.

What's more is that I have no idea who to blame, MS (who I have now renamed Failcrosoft, due to the depressing frequency with which this kind of thing happens), or whoever the hell it was that wrote this game. I may try to download it again in the foolish hope that the download was corrupted, I'm not averse to throwing good bandwidth after bad.