The Blog for the Sports Gamer

For once having a child puke all over me was worth it. No, really. On Thursday Ana got a touch of something that her little belly didn’t agree with. My shirt didn’t think much of it either. But she was acting fine and slept through the night without incident so off to daycare she sent the next day. No sooner do I get to work, though, than I get the call that she’s got problems with… put delicately, the other end. So back I go to pick her up and take her home. Of course on a whim I checked the Best Buy inventory locator before leaving work and wouldn’t you know it, the Best Buy near daycare had some 360s in stock. Finally my stockpiling of BB gift cards, narco-study money and Christmas cash became worth it. I don’t know if I got the last premium system they had on hand, but I’m sure they’d of been gone had I waited until the end of the day. It even made up for the fact that when I picked up a crying Anastasia from her crib at 10:00 that night she puked on me again.

For those keeping score at home, my daughter has now vomited on me on three separate occasions in the past year (not counting baby spit ups which are nothing compared to good old-fashioned spew). My wife: not once. Yeah, that’s fair.

On to the 360 (pt.1 of this post is focused on the hardware)…

Gotta say, it’s the little things that I like about this console. The fact that the wireless controller can be used to power it on and turn it off without having to physically walk over and do it manually. I hated that about the Xbox. I also love that I was able to easily get remote control codes for it for my Harmony remote control. It’s incredibly easy to hook it into your home LAN and play music off your PC or view pictures. It’s fantastic that you can so easily jump from a game to the Xbox dashboard. The excellence of the Live integration people have been raving about isn’t just a bunch of hype. It’s done very, very well.

In fact my only beef with the much bally-hooed Live Marketplace is the inan credit purchasing system. The notion that I should have to buy points in order to purchase little things like additional skins or gamercard avatars is silly. I get it for some of the arcade games, but for skins? EA, for example, has put up avatars and skins for all the NFL and NBA teams, but you actually have to pay to get them? Why? They’re skins and team logos for heaven’s sake. I wouldn’t mind so much if you could actually get these points through playing games, but near as I can tell the only way to get them is to buy them. (Someone correct me if I’m wrong about that.) Ain’t no way, no how am I buying skins and avatars that ought to be given away for free or made available to you for buying the game associated with them. (For example, getting the NFL stuff for free if you buy Madden.)

I also think a lot of the games Live Marketplace games are overpriced. I mean I like Joust and Guantlet as much as the next 30-year old game geek, but 400 points (which I think is like $5) is a rip off. It makes it doubly-annoying because I already have most of those games form the Midway Arcade Classics collections (1 and 2) and those aren’t listed on the compatibility list. Make of that what you will conspiracy-theorists.

The 360 also serves as a far better DVD player than did the Xbox (even with the HD pack). I mean just being able to turn the thing on and off via remote is nice, but the picture quality it produces is visibly better than what the Xbox could do. And although I haven’t tried it, the docs indicate you can hook up a USB keyboard to type data into games, online chats, etc., which is just gravy. (Oh, and for those who might be concerned about it, transferring your Xbox Live account to a 360 Live Gold account is fast and easy.)

As for the controller, I thought I would miss the black and white buttons. I never cared for the four trigger design of the PS2 controller, but I think MS did a good job here. The additional triggers are much smaller and are better spaced away from the larger triggers and it makes it much easier for me to use the right ones. On the PS2 controller, the few times I used it, I always had trouble with tapping the wrong triggers. It’s also nice that the controller shuts itself off after a few minutes of inactivity so it’s not wasting battery power.

So, what’s not to like? Honestly, not much comes to mind. The power brick is indeed a paper weight of massive proportions, but the console itself is mercifully light so I don’t mind so much. The component cables seem like they’re on the cheap side, but I don’t know enough about cable construction to know that for sure. In any case, the HD pack for the Xbox was a more convenient design because you could use any component cable with it that you wanted thanks to a breaktout box. The one that comes with the 360 uses the proprietary connector at one end and the component cables at the other, without the breakout box in between.

I’m also a little ticked that it didn’t come with a remote (was that only on release day?), but since the IR receiver is built in that shortcoming is mitigated by the fact that my Harmony controls it just fine (as does the wireless controller, for both games and DVDs). Overall I’m not blown away by the look of the console, but then I don’t really care about that stuff.

As easy as it is to use the dashboard and connect to your LAN for music and pictures, there’s very little customization you can do to keep things organized. It does a credible job of using digital music file tags to organize your music, but if you’re like my family and have your pictures organized into about a billion different subfolders, getting to a specific one is something of a nightmare. (Granted I don’t plan to do much picture viewing via my TV, but it just could’ve been implemented better.) I also don’t understand why you can stream images and music from your PC, but not video files. You can play movie files, but they have to be on the Xbox hard drive? And my guess is that means the only way to do that is to download movies from Live because there doesn’t appear to be a way to copy them over. Again, a minor quibble, but I think it would be cool to download movie trailers and such and stream them to your TV via the 360. (And hey, not to mention all that downloaded porn, right?)

Right now I’ve got two games for the console. I bought NBA2k6 with the console (surprise, surprise) and last night I went out and rented King Kong. I’ll talk about those games a bit in my next post.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 23rd, 2006 at 10:43 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.