Step Right Up!

One of the touted features of the XBox 360 is access to the online community which includes the XBox Live Marketplace. The Marketplace is where you can download demos and trailers of games and get additional content for the games you already own. This is something most PC owners enjoy for free, but Microsoft adds a new twist, making you pay to access some of this stuff. That's right, to access some of the content on the Marketplace, you've got to use points, which you can earn by playing games or purchase outright. In many ways, it's like the local arcade/pizza joint, where you get a pocketful of tokens which you spend on redemption games, which gets you a mountain of tickets that you can only exchange for a cheap plastic toy. Leave it to Microsoft to come up with a way to make us pay for something we used to get for free.