Aug 25 , 2007. Microsoft givesaway free Xbox 360s and more.

This is for the people who completely ignore online ads. Microsoft has been posting ads all over the place about their free Xbox 360 giveaway. What's the catch you ask? You see, MSN is crap when it comes to searching. People use it last. So Microsoft decides to create club.live, which is a search engine that looks alot like google. It even has the images search thing. So now they need traffic. That's where you come in. By competing in their club.live search contest to win prizes like the free 360, their search engine gets ALOT of hits. Everything you type in returns a search result. So Microsoft can use these hits to show customers that they got the most popular search engine on the web. Good work there.

The games are all puzzle games. They'll really give your brain a workout about useless facts. And if you don't know any useless facts, there's always the Microsoft search engine that spits out the hints for you. Although some of the hints are just plain wrong. The Chicktionary game requires the least amount of useless knowledge. You just have to make words out of the letters they give you. Pretty easy. And it's worth 20 tickets if you get the game correct.

For 105 tickets, which is about 5 Chicktionary games, you get a ringtone or song download. The Ring Tone doesn't work with many phones and the song download is in Windows format. So you got to convert it yourself for MP3. But the song is from a master track so it's real good quality. It will probably take you 30 minutes to do five games if you want the full 20 tickets. You can do about eight games in 10 minutes if you don't mind getting 14 tickets per game. Microsoft always gives you partial credits for games if you giveup.

For 350 tickets, you get playing cards? For 700 tickets, you get a mug. This stuff is crap. Who the hell wants playing cards from Microsoft? And you can get a mug from Walmart anytime for almost nothing. For 525 tickets, you get 5 song downloads from master tracks. This is good and takes around an hour or two to get using Chicktionary.

The 900 to 1100 range is pure crap. They got baseball caps, tshirts, magazines, and a headphone. The kinda stuff they giveaway if you enter a marathon or something. Which is close to the amount of time you need to play Chicktionary to get these prices.

For 1400 tickets, you can get a 360 faceplate, for 1500 you get the LifeChat headset, and for 1800, you can get Arcade Unplugged. The headset is the best deal here. The arcade unplugged and faceplates aren't worth the time to get them.

The other stuff isn't really worth the effort so we'll skip them. For 3800 tickets, you can get the Live Cam. This is a nice camera, but you'll hit the point limit for Chicktionary before you get 3800 tickets. That means you'll have to play trivia games to get this cam. We're going to say around 6 to 10 hours of playing. So the prizes that are left are really only good for people who have ALOT of free time.

For an eye-popping 20,000 tickets, you can get the Zune or Windows Vista Home Premium Edition. Unless playing these games is your job, prepare to waste a few months worth of spare time on getting these products. Frankly, the Zune isn't exactly doing very well so why would you want it? It's not the ultimate edition of Vista so why bother getting Vista here? For 25,000 tickets, you can get Office Standard Edition, which is worth around $100 on ebay. That's like $.05 an hour for the time you had to put in to get this thing.

Okay, for a mind blowing 35,000 tickets, you get the 360 pro bundle which includes the wireless controller, headset, hard drive, three games, Xbox Live Arcade unplugged, and a one year subscription to Xbox Live Gold. Now we're kinda torn in half here. Some of us feel it's worth the time (which is half a year if you play on and off to get this thing), but others feel it's insane to devote half a year to getting a 360. It's really up to the person. It's still free, but costs alot of your free time. The pro package is really nice, and it might just come with the new 65nm 360s that are less likely to overheat. Maybe.

Our view is if you got to play free online games, these are the best. You get to learn a whole lot of useless facts that you can impress people with, and you get some good free stuff. There's some sort of zone where the prizes are worthless, but if you can get pass the worthless zone, and we mean way pass, you can get the ultimate prize. And that's cool. Also read the rules before entering. You need to be over a certain age and be a resident of the US.