Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year folks.

The guys in the Whirlpool Forums started up [WP] clan in COD4. I joined and I’ve been playing with them on nights that I can. Its good fun, no abuse during or after the match in the lobby, just banter and the occasional joke. Also they’re all Aussie and we get awesome ping times.

Fantastic.

I’m currently level 22. It appears that when you get to level 55 and you’ve unlocked all the achievements, you can choose to go into “Prestige mode” where you LOSE all the weapons, mods and perks you’ve unlocked and start again… but you get a pretty star next to your name.

Ahh… no thanks!

Yeah, I haven’t blogged much lately. It’s been pretty busy here, for some reason November and December seem to be the most mental times of year for me.

Something has been annoying me though, I’ve been enjoying the technical wonder that is Xbox Live lately and while it has some very cool features… erm, OK, one very cool feature: “The Friends List”. It also has one really annoying feature as well:

“Rude American Kids”

To explain, the first game I got for my xbox was “Halo 3″. And while I loved the single player campaign of the Halo series, I just couldn’t want to play this game online. The only problem is once you get online every 14 year old with a headset seems to be screaming “FAG” and “HOMO” (That link is NOT safe for work!) into their headphones every 5 seconds, not to mention the “F” and “C”-bombs and just general swearing for the sake of it.

You can just imagine these kids are probably pimply-faced little twerps who would probably crap their pants if you grabbed them in real life. But within the safety of their mother’s basement.. they’re real tough guys.

Now, maybe I should just ignore them, but it’s quite difficult and really ruining the gaming experience for me. Some of my friends told me it’s just Halo that’s bad because generally it’s kids that play it.

Fair enough, but for my birthday I got “Call of Duty 4″ (a much more realistic war simulation). Now, I LOVED the original Call of Duty series. I played COD2 for endless hours online on the PC and it was great. You could chat during the match (with complete strangers from all over the world) via the keyboard, and again in the lobby after we’d been killed… and there was hardly any abuse. In fact usually everybody would type “GG” (Good Game) afterwards or we’d crack jokes or laugh at a funny kill.

But with COD4 on Xbox Live it’s just the same as Halo. It seems that if you’re a teenager with an American accent and a loud voice it’s your duty to shout profanity and call into question the sexual orientation of all the other players who didn’t kill as many people as you did.

Maybe I’m getting old, but with the proliferation of headsets and consoles… it’s just not fun anymore.

Is it just me or is December crazy time??