Gee, I go away for a couple days and look what happens. (Nothing.)

Anyway, I spent a good amount of this time away playing Mech Assault, and if ever I wanted an XBox, broadband, and XBox live, that time is now. I think that any game where you take huge robots, and then you get on the Internet, and then you start shooting each other with these huge robots is a good idea. I think that if these fights are intense and very nicely balanced, well that’s just icing on the cake. Big explosions help, as do very functional weapons and widely varied robots.

I had been under the impression, though, that everybody on XBox live, and indeed the Internet itself by and large, is a bastard. Being squarely against hassling with computer gaming and unable to afford broadband, I hadn’t really had a chance to confirm this theory. I found though that this doesn’t seem to be quite as undeniably true as some would have you believe. Maybe I was really unbelievably lucky or something, but I only ran into one truly annoying, stupid person in the entirety of my two days of Mech Assault experience. (He kept using the robot voice filter, and I couldn’t understand a word he said, but that did not stop him from talking. Nor did our constant pleas to kindly shut the fuck up.) Most of them were perfectly reasonable, intelligent people whose presence I enjoyed.

Some of them were a little young, they didn’t all quite understand the game, but they weren’t rude or anything. There was some minor trash talk but nothing I wouldn’t hear in a rock album or rock concert, or non-rock-related-thing. But really there was just that one guy, and the rest were pretty okay.

I don’t know, maybe I’m too forgiving, or maybe the Internet bitches too much. Your guess isn’t as good as mine.