Andy Laub

Last Saturday, thanks to the recent release of Saints Row, I was finally motivated to buy an Xbox 360. Of all places, I decided on Sam’s Club since they have a bundle that gives me $470 worth of stuff (Xbox 360 + 2nd wireless controller + charger kit) for $450. I also bought the game there since they have it for $5 less.

Oddly enough, waiting for them to get a new shipment of consoles off the shelf was probably the most frustrating part of the entire experience thus far. Or maybe it was when I realized I’ve managed to completely F up my gamerscore by using a cheat code, but more on that later. Anyway, once we made it home everything went much more smoothly.

Setup

One of the perks of the premium system is that it includes the component video cable, necessary for High-Def picture. Even better, I found after some research that the cable itself has a port to plug in an optical cable for digital audio, meaning I didn’t have to go on a post purchase cable shopping spree like I did with the first Xbox. Everything for the best picture and the best sound is there for you.

The setup process is a joy - it’s fun, like on a new Mac. It’s also very brief, but easy to find if you need to go back to it. The Dashboard is beautiful (with customizable themes if you don’t care for the rainbow look) and works very well. What impressed me even more is how integrated the OS is with the game that you’re playing, meaning the press of a button will pull up a side menu where you can select an outside source for music (like, say… a Mac on the same network) or take a quick look at your profile without affecting your game. It also gives you the option from there to go back to the full Dashboard (which will prompt you to end your gaming session). Even better, that same little button on the controller has the power to turn the console on and off. To turn it off, however, you’ll need to hold it down and then confirm that you do want to shut down when the menu slides up.

Online

Of course, without Live, the Xbox would just be a plain old console, right? That’s up for debate, but it definitely adds another level to the experience. The 360 includes an ethernet cable for wired networking, which worked slick when I tried it out. Unfortunately, we don’t have any source of wired ethernet in its permanent home, so a wireless adapter was called for. Microsoft makes one, of course, but holy cow, that’s a little more than I think I’m comfortable with.

Thankfully, my boss came to the rescue (he plays video games, and that’s awesome) and pointed out the Linksys WGA11B, a wireless game adapter. It worked from the minute I plugged it in, and all I had to do was tell it the network name (since we hide ours). One of the reasons I think its such a steal is that it only runs the 802.11b standard, meaning it’s slooooow for demo downloads, but I have the console set up so it can stay on all night downloading while everything else is off.

With that, I have access for free to Xbox Live Silver, and the console also included a free 1-month trial of Live Gold, which is what you need for playing games with other people. The other services of Live—your profile, the Arcade, demo & video downloads, etc— are all free to access. It was extremely easy to set up a Live account, and if I decide I want to continue the Gold service, I can buy it right from the Xbox. Yes, I only think it’s a little weird to be using a game console for buying things.

Cheating

Your Live profile also includes something called a gamer score, which keeps track of various achievements that you’ve unlocked in all the games you’ve played. They could be simple things like making it through the first two missions in Saints Row or extremely lengthy things, like killing 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) zombies in Dead Rising. Unfortunately, my propensity for cheating in GTA carried over to Saints Row. This meant that because I tried a cheat on one mission in the game and saved, SR decided it was no longer going to keep track of the 20 or so achievements I unlocked since then because of that one time, even though that cheat is no longer in effect. I would’ve liked to have been made aware, because fixing it would require playing through the entire game (which is now finished) again.

Conclusion

Aaaanyway, that’s kind of beside the point, and I’ll be the first to admit that it was my own damn fault for cheating in the first place. But this has set the perfect tone for my list of gripes, eh? Here they are:

• The CD drive is loud.
• Games are expensive.

That’s it. That’s everything I can honestly think of that I don’t care for at the moment. The point is, Microsoft has done an incredibly good job on this machine.

Some crazy Apple users (me included at times), are always saying it’s not the hardware and software that matter, it’s the experience. With the Xbox 360, Microsoft shows that they’ve figured it out.