Even in your videogames.
Most software (and most every thing else these days) comes with a lot of fine print regarding what your rights are with regards to the item you’ve just bought. Most of the time my attitude towards stuff like this is pretty simple:
I bought it. It’s mine. Who gives a shit what you have to say on the subject.
With downloaded (paid for, not pirated) software, that attitude won’t really fly. If you don’t follow the usage guidelines you can end up buying it again. Wow, wouldn’t that suck?
Which makes it all the more surprising that MicroSoft isn’t making me buy the same game twice.
When I set up my Xbox 360 I gave my address as the US. (I’m from there, I still get mail there, my passport says I can go back there…) I don’t really consider it my home, but when the 360 was telling me I could only set the language to Japanese if I wanted to say I lived in Japan, I balked.It would seem I balked too soon.
You can change the language after you’ve set stuff up, but I didn’t know that at the time.
One of the nifty things on the 360 is the Live Arcade. It’s a collection of small, downloadable games that are pretty fun to play. (Most of them, anyways.) You can only download the trial version, but that’s enough to give you a taste of most of the games. If you like them, you can buy the full version with Marketplace Points. (MP is the Xbox’s answer to online currency.) I’d enjoyed some of the demos and wanted to get the full versions of a couple of the games, so I picked up a 1400 point card (most games are 400 or 800 points) on Sunday night.
Only to get home and find out the code didn’t work.
At first I thought maybe it was my fault. I’d scraped off parts of some of the letter when I was getting that removable foily goop off the back of the card. (Guess I was a bit overeager to test out my new knife….) Wondering if that was the case, I took a macro photo of the card and tried to clean up my mess as best I could. I tried every variation I could think of, but none of them got it to work.
Shit.
Then I started thinking maybe it was a “Japan card – US 360” issue. Which it shouldn’t have been, seeing how as I have a Japanese 360. But in case that was it, I sent the photo of the card to a friend of mine who also has a J-model system to let him try it out. It didn’t work for him either.
But he’d also set his home country to the US.
I got to futzing around in the Dashboard (the 360’s user interface) tonight and re-ran the initial setup.
This time choosing Japan for my home country.
Since I’d gone through it once before and had most of the console configured there wasn’t a lot I had to do. Just plug in my hotmail address, zip code and choose (another GamerTag – the Xbox’s online ID). That all went smoothly so I jumped over to the Marketplace to enter the code.
Well, I’ll be damned – it worked!
Seems it doesn’t matter what country the system is from, just the one you tell it it’s in. (Though MS does say changing the country will not affect DVD or game region settings.) Finding this out was a huge relief to me, as the points are slightly cheaper in Japan than in the US, but all the content’s the same.
So what does all that have to do with fine print?
I’ll tell you.I got so frustrated with the point card code not working that I busted out my debit card and bought 1,000 points online. (I was also damned eager to get into the full version of Mutant Storm Reloaded.) Got the points just fine, unlocked the game and have been having a blast with it. But I noticed something odd when I logged on with my new GamerTag tonight.
They 360 said I hadn’t downloaded it.
I panicked just a bit. Was I going to have to spend another 800 points to get the game I’d already bought? Was I going to have to re-download all the demos, trials and trailers I’d already gotten? (A big deal, since we’re talking about a gig and a half’s worth of stuff here.)
Thankfully, no.
Here’s what the fine print has to say on the subject of multiple accounts on one machine:
“You can use this item on the first Xbox 360 console that you used to download it. Access to this item will be granted to all users on this console. If you transfer the item using a memory unit or other storage device, you will also be able to use it on other Xbox 360 consoles, but you’ll need to sign in to Xbox Live with your Xbox Live account on that console before accessing the item.”
You know what? That’s pretty fair!
I won’t lose out on the game I’ve bought and if I find something else to use up those other 200 points, I can still access them as well.
Now I just wonder how fair Sony will be with similar stuff when it comes launch time for the PS3….