It's 4 months after Christmas and I finally got my 360.
Was it worth the wait? Well, since I'm a grownup, the answer has to be yes. It's got what I liked about the original XBox and more, so of course I'm satisfied.
Anybody who has been poking their heads in at the local Best Buy has seen Call of Duty playing on the HD Samsung on the display. Having the 360 at home is even more mind-rocking, especially if you have an HD set. I don't, but it's still pretty awesome. So the first question is whether or not new 360 games look better than old XBox games without the addition of HD and the answer is a resounding yes. Sure 'Call of Duty 2' has been hyped, but not overhyped. It's that good, and the standard of graphics is that much better. The same is true for PGR3 and Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, two other must-have titles that I have.
I'm simply shocked at how often you hear arguments about how many PS2s are out there and how the greater number of titles makes them a winner against XBox. That's completely silly. As every real gamer knows there are good games and there are great games. The very good games and the great games are almost always on both platforms. There are only a few exceptions, namely (Guitar Hero, Resident Evil) and (Halo, PGR, ) for the XBox. It really comes down to that handful, which is essentially nothing if you are a PC gamer as well.
News from the talk on XBox Live.
- A big Microsoft / Bungie announcement on the last day of E3 on 'The Forerunner Project'. Everybody knows it's Halo 3. The question is when does it ship? I say 30% odds of it shipping this Christmas.
- If the PS3 goes for 600 bucks, it's the beginning of the end for the PS3.
- Gamers hate the new controllers for both the PS3 and the Wii.
More on the actual games later.
The new wireless controller eats batteries pretty quickly. Then again I'm sure I've done some 20 hours of gaming over the past two weeks. Other than that, thinking that I might hate it because it's too small - I basically retrained my hands. Now I'm cool and I almost never think about it. They must have known something like this might happen. I've got a good 50 foot range on the wireless controller and no lag or anything like that. Once again the ergonomics pros at Microsoft have pulled off a surprising success.
It took me about 30 minutes to setup the new console. It was a snap, actually easier than the first time. All of my old Live info moved over with no problem.
The new panel interface is also a fairly brilliant piece of design. There's a huge amount of information that can be set from there, which I've yet to navigate. But it's very intuitive for a guy like me and a significant improvement over the prior version. Concretely, the XBox Live panel being available at anytime is brilliant. The ability to send game invites to multiple friends is a big improvement. The update of friends coming available is very nice, especially now that you can see, essentially when somebody accepts a friend invite. The messaging interface defaulting to voice is very nice. Some of the defaulted selections could use a bit more contrast in the default skin. I've moved it to the Halo theme and it's better. I would have been happier to allow gamers to upload any avatar icon and leave it to feedback to determine whether or not they were too 'underground' rather than have it the way it seems to be now.. locked up with a dozen goofy defaults. MSFT needs to publish an avatar studio.
I have mixed feelings about Microsoft Points. They work too easily. It's a convenient way to spend too much money on gaming.
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