I’ve heaped quite a bit of praise on the Xbox 360 around here, so now that I’ve finally found something that really, really gets my goat, it seems only fair to rant about it.

I’ll leave aside for a moment the fact that I still think it’s extortion to require a $50 annual fee for the privilege of playing the multiplayer versions of games I already paid for. I’ll mostly ignore for now the “point” system you’re required to convert your money into, which is clearly designed to make you feel like you’re spending less than you are. And I won’t even harp on the fact that it costs about $10 (or should I say, 800 points) just to change your screen name.

No, what is getting my knickers in a twist is that I must have a “gamer picture” icon associated with my account, I can’t design my own picture for it, I don’t like any of the free ones they give me to use, and while I can pay to download new icons, Microsoft won’t let me see any of the pictures before downloading them. This is flat-out ridiculous. If charging $50 a year is roughly analogous to charging $4 for a soda at the movies, this icon pricing is roughly the equivalent of asking for an extra 50 cents for ice made out of some mystery liquid that may or may not be water. There’s a web page listing all the gamer picture packs available on Xbox Live Marketplace, and yet even here you can’t see what the actual pictures are.

I mean, okay, I can probably guess what’s in the Pac-man Picture Pack, right? Maybe a Pac-man and four ghosts. Cherries? Well, who can say. And how many icons? Not sure. At the risk of overfilling this post with similes, this is kind of like paying $2.35 for stickers, only you don’t get any actual stickers, and you don’t get to see them before handing over your money, and there are no refunds available. (Also, zero percent chance of scratch and sniff goodness.)

Please leave a comment or send an email (jason @ this domain) if you know how to hack this.

Update: Oh. Well, okay. I still have no idea how to find these previews without using their search box, but at least they exist somewhere.