"but to me being a kid going through a school killing your peers is something nobody should WANT to do..."
But apparently, there ARE people that want to.
I don't think the proper response is to ignore the pink elephant in the room asking "Why?"
Work some google-fu, find out how the "game" is actually treating the subject and you might find that your unfounded guesses about the material might be wrong. But you don't have to, because ignorance is bliss.
This is EXACTLY why I'm plugging away so much time into Geometry Wars. There's no goals otherwise, it just gets harder, then you die. If I get a good score, that may be nice, but it's no real benchmark without comparison.
But since I can see my friends scores and their achievements, it's compelled us to strive for the next one, then the next.
Also note that they're primarily selling games on a retail basis rather than suscription. They got their money when you bought the game, if you spend hundreds of hours getting achievements for a free game they don't get anything more.
However, if you only play say 10-20 hours and then have nothing to do but go buy another game, they get more money.
Yah, few people associate the achievement number with skill since it doesn't seem like there's any standard for doling them out. Though they may be impressed by particular achievements like the highest Geometry Wars achievements.
Really, I'm satisfied even with the small somewhat easy ones. Just having that little bloop and the message popping up gratifies me, and I wanna see what "feat" I accomplished, since I'm betting I'm not alone in that I love to get achievements but don't actually pursue them until I've completed the game.
Really, it's much like the MMO grind for ficticious prestige. It doesn't matter that the prestige is all in your head, it feels real and it makes you want it.
This is an interesting point to take in with regard to HL2:Episode One's developer commentary mode. They make the same comment about feeling comfortable with their engine early into the game. Throughout the rest of the developer commentary, the primary focus is in discussion of how they tested and revised, tested and revised, in going through each section of the game.
A great deal of focus went into improving the NPC relationship (Alyx) with the player, and how they specifically crafted the experience to try to stop the player from just wanting to plant a bullet in her forehead like with all the HL1+2 scientists. They learned from past experience.
I don't think anybody prefers paid advertising on Wikipedia over free donations. What is being talked about is whether or not Wikipedia should exist at all if free donations fail to meet Wikipedia's growing belt.
If it doesn't get enough free donations it stops working. Then it should just die? I'd prefer an advertising wikipedia over no wikipedia at all, and would prefer a donation-run wikipedia over an advertising wikipedia.
As for a multi-national government-subsidized wikipedia, that's not all that different from the problems with an advertising wikipedia, just on a different scale.
Make it a religion if you want, believe in it all you like, but Wikipedia still needs money to run and won't be fueled on belief and truthiness like some other religions. Just keep donating and your reasons for doing it end up irrelevant. Just get Wikipedia the money in the end, it's too good to lose.
"Regardless of the outcome of this particular incident, the move on Starbucks' part comes off as unmistakably in touch with today's communication modes and methods."
The final comment of the summary does have the ring of truth(or shall I say, truthiness?).
But then I stop to think...c'mon, this is Youtube. How hard is it to post something on Youtube, a free service? What's more interesting is that this move is a suprise rather than the suprise itself.
Sometimes it's just not their cup of tea. The game is vast and the time expenditure can be more than a casual gamer can muster. They may start playing and find they couldn't accomplish anything meaningful by the time they have to stop to do something else.
Some folks don't like open-ended play, and prefer directed and focused progression. They both have trade-offs.
Specific to Oblivion's gameplay, there were a number of problems that could have turned off players.
For example, all-knowing and all-seeing guards. If I steal a clay pot in one city, it's silly that in another city, everybody knows it's stolen goods. If I commit crimes that nobody could possible know of, it's silly to punish me for it. Cramped inventory system due to cross-development with a console, it was a step back from Morrowind. Scaling enemy spawns hindered progression. A random road-bandit should not have glistening mithril armor of the ages(just like yours!), this means that you haven't really gotten anywhere and you're still just average in that world. Also, scaling enemies reduces leveling. If I hit for 5 damage on a 10hp enemy, and later, hit for 50 damage on a 100hp enemy, it's still 2 hits. No leveling occurs in that situation since you're still just as weak as before, a level-up would have to expand your capabilities or else it's just window-dressing. This is not to say that there is no leveling, there is just less than what there appears to be.
Thank god for user-created content. The community created modules to fix ALL of these issues and improve the game beyond this both technically and in terms of content. Oblivion was horrible inefficient in their polygon counts, and the community stepped in to provide mods to vastly cut these down with no visual degradation. The community has been good to this game.
However, console Oblivion players do not have this available to them, and games are typically judged by what the developer provides(and in most cases, this too is restricted to the product at release). This is because not everyone is going to mod a game to the hilt(and not everyone knows how, or will spend the time researching), particularly if they are turned off by the game's release state.
It is a good game no question, but it's understandable how some people can find other games that they enjoy more. Listed here were reasons why Oblivion might not have been a top pick for some players, but only because that was the question being asked. The reasons why it should have been picked are quite numerous as well. The key is where each person places the greater amounts of emphasis.
Something to note: In Dead Rising, you're not supposed to win on your first try. You start weak and slow, with no idea where anything is in the mall.
You level up, fail, and restart with levels retained, and now you're cruising through stronger, faster, and armed with knowledge of how to make it through the mall (QuickStep and triple-extended small chainsaws). It's not just repeating everything, because since you're more capable, you have extra time to catch the concurrent scoops. This was why the time limits were so constrictive, they weren't meant to be tackled on the first play-through.
I was able to get all scoops from level 1, but only because I had returned my harddrive where I had already played through the majority of the game and learned all the details of the mall.
However, it shouldn't have to be explained that the game wasn't meant to be beaten in the first play-through, that's the game's responsibility to convey(though this is also explained in loading screen tips).
Geometry Wars: I was suprised to find that this ~5 dollar game gave me more play-time than many of my 60 dollar games this years. There's always this sense that you're riding the knife's edge over oblivion. Coupled with the opportunity to beat your last score keeps you playing this apparently simple game over and over through the continuous tension.
Company of Heroes: I typically loathe RTS games and the frantic resource management+rush focus. But in this game, because of the tactical emphasis in conjuction with strategy I found myself thoroughly enjoying the gameplay. It ran smoothly at full settings even on my aging rig, though network connection problems were constant in multiplayer.
HL2: Episode 1: This game offered little innovation, but where it distinguished itself was through quality and polish. In particular, I was impressed in that they made me want to protect Alyx rather than plant a bullet in her forehead, as with the scientists of HL1. The developer commentary mode sheds insight on how this was achieved. They also discuss deliberate gameplay pacing in order to keep the experience from feeling repetitive and aimless. This demonstrated how the accumulated experience through crafting HL1 and HL2 served allowed them to improve their skills for this admittedly short campaign.
Definitely unavailable here. In those 3am lineups uou only see the 30-odd people come morning because people find out how many units are available.
What we miss is all the people who came by between 3am-7/8am to get into line only to find that they're already too late and go home. This was the last pre-christmas shipment.
I don't think it'll be possible to buy a Wii through walk-ins in my area(upstate NJ) till at least February.
I heat my room with my PC and Xbox360. It's a very small room. The house is only marginally heated to a cool 63 degrees. Playing games on the PC or Xbox360 drives the heat in my room to the point where I begin to sweat. I have to periodically get up to open the door to vent the heat back out into the rest of the house.
As soon as I saw an electronic victim I would have just started jamming on the shock button as fast as I could until it died...just as an experiment. I would observe the response from the "authority". I'd note what he'd attribute my seemingly violent and malicious outburst to.
When he asks why I did it. I'll tell him it's the only way I can orgasm. [/Ichi]
I see this mentioned several times in the article's comments and I'm seeing it again here on/.
While the point is valid, the possible benefits that may be reaped from enforcing distance between cars is dulled by the side effect.
The asshole cut off someone in another lane. He fit into the gap between that car and the car in front of it. This causes the victim to slow down to recreate that safe driving distance.
Remove the safe driving distance and ride the front car's ass, if the jackass wants to change lanes, he's going to have to sacrifice his car to do it. The jackass can't fit into the gap anymore. The jackass wants to weave through traffic into the fastest lane. Opening up gaps just makes him weave continually until he finds that he doesn't have any gaps left to jump into.
Of course, tailgating all the time will cause lots of fender benders and will cause trouble when there are people who have a legitimate reason to change lanes.
A price drop? When the things are selling as fast as they can be taken out of the shipping box, selling them for less money is not a likely prospect.
You can't sell faster than instantly sold out. There's not even much value in undercutting the competition further, because you won't switch anybody off the other consoles because...there's no Wiis to switch off onto, they're all already sold.
A price drop is likely, but probably not until at least until everyone who's already set on getting a Wii has one. It'd be silly to lower the price while people are still camped out at 3am for them and buying them all away as soon as the store opens.
This simple two line-bit of text sounds a lot better than all the pessimistic minimum-effort-required comments I'm seeing. I can understand the reasoning that you shouldn't do more than you're being rewarded for, but this kind of mentality would make me more bitter than I already am. I don't want work to add to my distaste for daily life.
I'd much rather follow the parent's advice in the hopes that doing such will cause the employer to directly recognize me when I try to apply some "extra-mile" effort to distinguish myself amongst my co-workers. Hopefully this will help me advance until one day I get to be the employer screwing people to the wall instead of being the screwee.
Obliquely related, I think that the primary tool that the computer illiterate needs is pattern recognition.
Few will need to be doing anything particular complex or arcane. Most will simply use the basic tools like the text editor and the browser. However, across many of these low-level programs there is an easily recognizable trend.
Let's say I don't like the way something appears?
Go to the options, typically found in drop-down menus across the top, find "options" or "preferences" and repeat from the menu that opens.
If it's not at the top, check for a left hand column.
It's not specific to programs and isn't an exact methodology, but it's much much much faster than swimming your eyes randomly across a sea of text without any idea of how to proceed. It's a general guideline to finding what you want from a program.
Human interface design is intended to streamline the use of the program, and over the years, these patterns accumulate and become adapted. We don't see the options menu column on the right hand of the screen, that's where we stick the scroll bar and we'd mis-click the options all the time if that were the case. Thus, it's common to find such options on the left-hand column, as you can see here on slashdot. However, there are people like my father who do not know this, and fail to write off the right side of the screen as a potential location for options on a webpage. This is a huge handicap to their reading speed. This is also true of books. Where's the most likely location of the main ideas? Check the first few lines of each paragraph. Some just jump around, straight to the middle of a paragraph, and flail around at random. These are basic things that are so ingrained into the "literate" that it becomes subconscious behavior, but it must still be explained to those who haven't developed the habit.
"How do I save a file?" It's the same process in just about every program low-level users will use! Go to File-"Save as"-save it in a folder you can remember. This is something commonly repeated in multiple programs, and yet some people still find the need to ask each time even when the process is exactly the same.
You have to talk to the employees and give them your driver's license, then they hand you the controller.
They should really put up a sign saying this, because you're not alone. I go into EBGames every day at lunchtime since it's in the mall where I buy my lunch on work days. I see people fiddling on all the other kiosks, but I only see people slow and gaze longingly at the Wii and wondering where the hell the wiimote is.
I am fascinated by the Wii, and already own two games(Zelda:TP and Super Monkey Ball) for the Wii...and I still do not own one. There just aren't any that aren't sold on the internet or on a freezing cold line at 3am.
So rather than going home empty-handed to sit out my holiday vacation days in boredom...I picked up an Xbox360 to tide me over till February when the Wii (hopefully) where the Wii is available on the inside of stores rather than the outside.
So my desire for the Wii managed to boost Xbox360 sales. Having an Xbox360 made a large number of games available to me, and it led to purchase a series of games I'd been curious about but never cared to pursue. So Nintendo can also be thanked for netting me 10-12 games(though only about 6 are new).
Naturally my story will not be common, but I don't think it will be all that rare. I just happen to have an excess of disposable income due to my circumstances and underdeveloped propensity to save.
You should've paid for the warranty. They weren't lying. Mine died in 6 days, my roommates in 2 weeks. The xbox has already popularized terms for its failures, "The red rings of death"(the system's indicator for internal hardware failure) and "bricked"(the heavy weight, uselessness, and rectangular shape of a dead xbox360) consoles. There are a large number of reasons for Xbox360s to die.
They're issuing a 1 year warranty from date of purchase now, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a smart idea to buy an extended warranty at the time.
There's no point in adding, "Mine works." That's the implicit expectation of a product. There is no lower expectation you can have besides the product not being broken.
The class action lawsuit over microsoft breaking un-modded along with modded xbox360s with the fall update(11/30) was just in this same section of slashdot recently. Small unscientific sample of 125 polled got just over 20% having problems with their Xbox360 over in HardForum in the Console Gaming section.
This 1 year warranty won't win any gratitude, rather, it's helping to repair damage to their reputation. It's a fantastic console when it works, but considering the large amount of problems that can occur, this 1 yr warranty is just making amends.
Nevertheless, offering it after the fact is far far better than simply ignoring the problem. And their gaming division really has improved their image in my eyes.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm going to hunt for my very own "Boomer" right now!
"but to me being a kid going through a school killing your peers is something nobody should WANT to do..."
But apparently, there ARE people that want to.
I don't think the proper response is to ignore the pink elephant in the room asking "Why?"
Work some google-fu, find out how the "game" is actually treating the subject and you might find that your unfounded guesses about the material might be wrong. But you don't have to, because ignorance is bliss.
This is EXACTLY why I'm plugging away so much time into Geometry Wars. There's no goals otherwise, it just gets harder, then you die. If I get a good score, that may be nice, but it's no real benchmark without comparison.
But since I can see my friends scores and their achievements, it's compelled us to strive for the next one, then the next.
Also note that they're primarily selling games on a retail basis rather than suscription. They got their money when you bought the game, if you spend hundreds of hours getting achievements for a free game they don't get anything more.
However, if you only play say 10-20 hours and then have nothing to do but go buy another game, they get more money.
Yah, few people associate the achievement number with skill since it doesn't seem like there's any standard for doling them out. Though they may be impressed by particular achievements like the highest Geometry Wars achievements.
Really, I'm satisfied even with the small somewhat easy ones. Just having that little bloop and the message popping up gratifies me, and I wanna see what "feat" I accomplished, since I'm betting I'm not alone in that I love to get achievements but don't actually pursue them until I've completed the game.
Really, it's much like the MMO grind for ficticious prestige. It doesn't matter that the prestige is all in your head, it feels real and it makes you want it.
This is an interesting point to take in with regard to HL2:Episode One's developer commentary mode. They make the same comment about feeling comfortable with their engine early into the game. Throughout the rest of the developer commentary, the primary focus is in discussion of how they tested and revised, tested and revised, in going through each section of the game.
A great deal of focus went into improving the NPC relationship (Alyx) with the player, and how they specifically crafted the experience to try to stop the player from just wanting to plant a bullet in her forehead like with all the HL1+2 scientists. They learned from past experience.
I don't think anybody prefers paid advertising on Wikipedia over free donations. What is being talked about is whether or not Wikipedia should exist at all if free donations fail to meet Wikipedia's growing belt.
If it doesn't get enough free donations it stops working. Then it should just die? I'd prefer an advertising wikipedia over no wikipedia at all, and would prefer a donation-run wikipedia over an advertising wikipedia.
As for a multi-national government-subsidized wikipedia, that's not all that different from the problems with an advertising wikipedia, just on a different scale.
Make it a religion if you want, believe in it all you like, but Wikipedia still needs money to run and won't be fueled on belief and truthiness like some other religions. Just keep donating and your reasons for doing it end up irrelevant. Just get Wikipedia the money in the end, it's too good to lose.
Thank you for taking the time to write that out.
I just have him stand behind me and choke me till I'm finished.
"Regardless of the outcome of this particular incident, the move on Starbucks' part comes off as unmistakably in touch with today's communication modes and methods."
The final comment of the summary does have the ring of truth(or shall I say, truthiness?).
But then I stop to think...c'mon, this is Youtube. How hard is it to post something on Youtube, a free service? What's more interesting is that this move is a suprise rather than the suprise itself.
Sometimes it's just not their cup of tea. The game is vast and the time expenditure can be more than a casual gamer can muster. They may start playing and find they couldn't accomplish anything meaningful by the time they have to stop to do something else.
Some folks don't like open-ended play, and prefer directed and focused progression. They both have trade-offs.
Specific to Oblivion's gameplay, there were a number of problems that could have turned off players.
For example, all-knowing and all-seeing guards. If I steal a clay pot in one city, it's silly that in another city, everybody knows it's stolen goods. If I commit crimes that nobody could possible know of, it's silly to punish me for it. Cramped inventory system due to cross-development with a console, it was a step back from Morrowind. Scaling enemy spawns hindered progression. A random road-bandit should not have glistening mithril armor of the ages(just like yours!), this means that you haven't really gotten anywhere and you're still just average in that world. Also, scaling enemies reduces leveling. If I hit for 5 damage on a 10hp enemy, and later, hit for 50 damage on a 100hp enemy, it's still 2 hits. No leveling occurs in that situation since you're still just as weak as before, a level-up would have to expand your capabilities or else it's just window-dressing. This is not to say that there is no leveling, there is just less than what there appears to be.
Thank god for user-created content. The community created modules to fix ALL of these issues and improve the game beyond this both technically and in terms of content. Oblivion was horrible inefficient in their polygon counts, and the community stepped in to provide mods to vastly cut these down with no visual degradation. The community has been good to this game.
However, console Oblivion players do not have this available to them, and games are typically judged by what the developer provides(and in most cases, this too is restricted to the product at release). This is because not everyone is going to mod a game to the hilt(and not everyone knows how, or will spend the time researching), particularly if they are turned off by the game's release state.
It is a good game no question, but it's understandable how some people can find other games that they enjoy more. Listed here were reasons why Oblivion might not have been a top pick for some players, but only because that was the question being asked. The reasons why it should have been picked are quite numerous as well. The key is where each person places the greater amounts of emphasis.
Something to note: In Dead Rising, you're not supposed to win on your first try. You start weak and slow, with no idea where anything is in the mall.
You level up, fail, and restart with levels retained, and now you're cruising through stronger, faster, and armed with knowledge of how to make it through the mall (QuickStep and triple-extended small chainsaws). It's not just repeating everything, because since you're more capable, you have extra time to catch the concurrent scoops. This was why the time limits were so constrictive, they weren't meant to be tackled on the first play-through.
I was able to get all scoops from level 1, but only because I had returned my harddrive where I had already played through the majority of the game and learned all the details of the mall.
However, it shouldn't have to be explained that the game wasn't meant to be beaten in the first play-through, that's the game's responsibility to convey(though this is also explained in loading screen tips).
Geometry Wars: I was suprised to find that this ~5 dollar game gave me more play-time than many of my 60 dollar games this years. There's always this sense that you're riding the knife's edge over oblivion. Coupled with the opportunity to beat your last score keeps you playing this apparently simple game over and over through the continuous tension.
Company of Heroes: I typically loathe RTS games and the frantic resource management+rush focus. But in this game, because of the tactical emphasis in conjuction with strategy I found myself thoroughly enjoying the gameplay. It ran smoothly at full settings even on my aging rig, though network connection problems were constant in multiplayer.
HL2: Episode 1: This game offered little innovation, but where it distinguished itself was through quality and polish. In particular, I was impressed in that they made me want to protect Alyx rather than plant a bullet in her forehead, as with the scientists of HL1. The developer commentary mode sheds insight on how this was achieved. They also discuss deliberate gameplay pacing in order to keep the experience from feeling repetitive and aimless. This demonstrated how the accumulated experience through crafting HL1 and HL2 served allowed them to improve their skills for this admittedly short campaign.
Definitely unavailable here. In those 3am lineups uou only see the 30-odd people come morning because people find out how many units are available.
What we miss is all the people who came by between 3am-7/8am to get into line only to find that they're already too late and go home. This was the last pre-christmas shipment.
I don't think it'll be possible to buy a Wii through walk-ins in my area(upstate NJ) till at least February.
I heat my room with my PC and Xbox360. It's a very small room. The house is only marginally heated to a cool 63 degrees. Playing games on the PC or Xbox360 drives the heat in my room to the point where I begin to sweat. I have to periodically get up to open the door to vent the heat back out into the rest of the house.
But think about all the channel-changing you can get done in 3 seconds!
As soon as I saw an electronic victim I would have just started jamming on the shock button as fast as I could until it died...just as an experiment. I would observe the response from the "authority". I'd note what he'd attribute my seemingly violent and malicious outburst to.
When he asks why I did it. I'll tell him it's the only way I can orgasm. [/Ichi]
I bet that'd throw his results off.
Hiyas.
I see this mentioned several times in the article's comments and I'm seeing it again here on /.
While the point is valid, the possible benefits that may be reaped from enforcing distance between cars is dulled by the side effect.
The asshole cut off someone in another lane. He fit into the gap between that car and the car in front of it. This causes the victim to slow down to recreate that safe driving distance.
Remove the safe driving distance and ride the front car's ass, if the jackass wants to change lanes, he's going to have to sacrifice his car to do it. The jackass can't fit into the gap anymore. The jackass wants to weave through traffic into the fastest lane. Opening up gaps just makes him weave continually until he finds that he doesn't have any gaps left to jump into.
Of course, tailgating all the time will cause lots of fender benders and will cause trouble when there are people who have a legitimate reason to change lanes.
The problem isn't easy to solve.
A price drop? When the things are selling as fast as they can be taken out of the shipping box, selling them for less money is not a likely prospect.
You can't sell faster than instantly sold out. There's not even much value in undercutting the competition further, because you won't switch anybody off the other consoles because...there's no Wiis to switch off onto, they're all already sold.
A price drop is likely, but probably not until at least until everyone who's already set on getting a Wii has one. It'd be silly to lower the price while people are still camped out at 3am for them and buying them all away as soon as the store opens.
This simple two line-bit of text sounds a lot better than all the pessimistic minimum-effort-required comments I'm seeing. I can understand the reasoning that you shouldn't do more than you're being rewarded for, but this kind of mentality would make me more bitter than I already am. I don't want work to add to my distaste for daily life.
I'd much rather follow the parent's advice in the hopes that doing such will cause the employer to directly recognize me when I try to apply some "extra-mile" effort to distinguish myself amongst my co-workers. Hopefully this will help me advance until one day I get to be the employer screwing people to the wall instead of being the screwee.
Obliquely related, I think that the primary tool that the computer illiterate needs is pattern recognition.
Few will need to be doing anything particular complex or arcane. Most will simply use the basic tools like the text editor and the browser. However, across many of these low-level programs there is an easily recognizable trend.
Let's say I don't like the way something appears?
Go to the options, typically found in drop-down menus across the top, find "options" or "preferences" and repeat from the menu that opens.
If it's not at the top, check for a left hand column.
It's not specific to programs and isn't an exact methodology, but it's much much much faster than swimming your eyes randomly across a sea of text without any idea of how to proceed. It's a general guideline to finding what you want from a program.
Human interface design is intended to streamline the use of the program, and over the years, these patterns accumulate and become adapted. We don't see the options menu column on the right hand of the screen, that's where we stick the scroll bar and we'd mis-click the options all the time if that were the case. Thus, it's common to find such options on the left-hand column, as you can see here on slashdot. However, there are people like my father who do not know this, and fail to write off the right side of the screen as a potential location for options on a webpage. This is a huge handicap to their reading speed. This is also true of books. Where's the most likely location of the main ideas? Check the first few lines of each paragraph. Some just jump around, straight to the middle of a paragraph, and flail around at random. These are basic things that are so ingrained into the "literate" that it becomes subconscious behavior, but it must still be explained to those who haven't developed the habit.
"How do I save a file?" It's the same process in just about every program low-level users will use! Go to File-"Save as"-save it in a folder you can remember. This is something commonly repeated in multiple programs, and yet some people still find the need to ask each time even when the process is exactly the same.
You have to talk to the employees and give them your driver's license, then they hand you the controller.
They should really put up a sign saying this, because you're not alone. I go into EBGames every day at lunchtime since it's in the mall where I buy my lunch on work days. I see people fiddling on all the other kiosks, but I only see people slow and gaze longingly at the Wii and wondering where the hell the wiimote is.
Anecdotal story, but I may speak for others:
I am fascinated by the Wii, and already own two games(Zelda:TP and Super Monkey Ball) for the Wii...and I still do not own one. There just aren't any that aren't sold on the internet or on a freezing cold line at 3am.
So rather than going home empty-handed to sit out my holiday vacation days in boredom...I picked up an Xbox360 to tide me over till February when the Wii (hopefully) where the Wii is available on the inside of stores rather than the outside.
So my desire for the Wii managed to boost Xbox360 sales. Having an Xbox360 made a large number of games available to me, and it led to purchase a series of games I'd been curious about but never cared to pursue. So Nintendo can also be thanked for netting me 10-12 games(though only about 6 are new).
Naturally my story will not be common, but I don't think it will be all that rare. I just happen to have an excess of disposable income due to my circumstances and underdeveloped propensity to save.
You should've paid for the warranty. They weren't lying. Mine died in 6 days, my roommates in 2 weeks. The xbox has already popularized terms for its failures, "The red rings of death"(the system's indicator for internal hardware failure) and "bricked"(the heavy weight, uselessness, and rectangular shape of a dead xbox360) consoles. There are a large number of reasons for Xbox360s to die.
They're issuing a 1 year warranty from date of purchase now, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a smart idea to buy an extended warranty at the time.
There's no point in adding, "Mine works." That's the implicit expectation of a product. There is no lower expectation you can have besides the product not being broken.
The class action lawsuit over microsoft breaking un-modded along with modded xbox360s with the fall update(11/30) was just in this same section of slashdot recently. Small unscientific sample of 125 polled got just over 20% having problems with their Xbox360 over in HardForum in the Console Gaming section.
This 1 year warranty won't win any gratitude, rather, it's helping to repair damage to their reputation. It's a fantastic console when it works, but considering the large amount of problems that can occur, this 1 yr warranty is just making amends.
Nevertheless, offering it after the fact is far far better than simply ignoring the problem. And their gaming division really has improved their image in my eyes.