Dear My Xbox, you better recognize!

Today was a good day in Halo 2 online gaming. It only took three tries for the Xbox to recognize the Halo 2 disc. This is a blessing, and it will be easy to understand why I appreciate it so much when I tell you that one day last week it took a grand total of 19 tries for it to work! Maybe the cleaning disc thing I used had something to do with the not-recognizing.

In any case, I'm glad that it worked, because sometimes it can get a little annoying saying "You better recognize!" many times to the Xbox. It's nice when the Xbox gets a clue that it really better recognize. At my last Halo 2 LAN Partay, we used a different Halo 2 disc on my Xbox and it loaded up just fine, so something that I was considering was getting a new Halo 2 disc, though my position on this changes on a day-to-day basis based on how many tries it took to recognize and load up the disk.

It's an awesome treat to hear the musical guitar-aided white screen with the multiplying blue cells zoom out Bungie logo *cymbal!* thing, but a lot of the time I just see a bunch of green lines criss-crossed across the screen. Either way, this is not nearly half the battle, as it will then take me to a dark blue screen with white letters saying "loading" with a number somewhere between 15-40%. I used to be anxious whenever I saw this, but now I either pray or change the channel and have the Xbox Halo 2 loading thing in "Picture-In-Picture" in the corner of the screen. It will try and fail three times to load up to 100%, and then it will say "there is a problem with your disc, blah blah blah press 'A' to go to the 'Xbox cannot recognize...' screen on your dashboard."

I get up from my seat, press the eject button for the disc tray to come out, press it again, sit back down, and hope that it recognizes and loads up this time. The various activities I do while I wait are pray, do 20 push-ups, get a snack, go to the bathroom, or do the picture-in-picture thing that I described earlier.

Don't get me wrong, I am very happy with my Xbox and I see it as a miracle that it can still load up Halo 2 (Project Gotham and LIVE Arcade are another story), and I am grateful that I can play this great game with a lot of great people which are on my LIVE friend's list.

I used to be really superstitious. When I first got LIVE, (this was before the major non-recognizing was going on) I made a promise to God that I would read the Bible and before playing on LIVE in the day that played. I thought that the way it worked was if I don't read, it don't recognize, if I actually keep my promise to God (just as a sidenote probably not a good idea not to make a promise to God like that) it would load up. I soon found out that this wasn't necessarily true. However, today I read and prayed, without being constantly thinking about playing Halo later, and it only took three tries.

I think the trick is to just read the Bible and pray without the intention of doing it so that I can play video games faster or to use it as a trick to get it to work, but instead to actually grow in the Lord.

And here I am again, back in my same-old superstitious nature!