I downloaded my free copy of Undertow and tried it out (if you have XBox Live, act now – it’s only free for a couple days) … it’s okay, but I certainly wouldn’t have bought it.  Not really my kind of game, I guess.  The graphics are good, and it seems like a fun challenge – but I have a hard time seeing which guy is mine at times.

At the end of the day, though, I think some of my lack of excitement about it is more because of how XBox handled the whole Live outages over the holidays.  Basically, there were several weeks where people had a hard time connecting to the online gaming service because so many people got new memberships for Christmas that it overloaded the system and crashed it.  Or something like that.  To me, the natural response would be to extend everyones’ memberships one month to make up for it – but that would cost XBox a lot of potential revenue.  Instead, they let us all download a game for free that wasn’t really selling and kind of bombed – in other words, they weren’t getting any revenue off it anyway, so let us have that.

I’m not really worked up about it – I’m still happy to get a new game.  It just kind of left a bad taste for me.  In my family’s coffee shop, if I sell someone a dud latte and they come back and tell me, I make them a good one and replace it with what they originally wanted … not give them a cookie and call it even.  But now it sounds like I’m complaining – which I’m not, it’s just a weird response in my opinion.