Bloody Microsoft. What they have done, in effect, is remove the only reason I had to buy bone fide Xbox games.
Here’s my reasoning. If you have a chipped Xbox and you play on Xbox Live with the chip activated, they can detect this immediately and turn you away (as far as I understand it). This makes sense - with the chip active, you may well be playing a pirated copy of the game in question.
If you turn the chip off, however, you can’t possibly be playing a copied game because your Xbox will only boot official game discs. For the same reason, you can’t possibly be running the game from hard disk, even if you have naughtily upgraded it against Microsoft’s crazy rules. Your only option if you want to play a game on Xbox Live is to buy a kosher copy of it.
However, Microsoft have banned me merely for having a modified hard disk in my system, even though I cannot use it while playing on Xbox Live. What does that leave me with? A broadband connection I can no longer use with Xbox Live, and no reason to buy Xbox games - I might as well just download them.
Not that I will, of course. I do believe in supporting game publishers and developers, and I barely play the games I have already bought. But this policy still doesn’t seem terribly well thought-out.
