My site’s still down so just throwing this page up quick with some pics & thoughts.  Finally got the XBox unpacked and hooked up.  The power brick is pretty much as big as everyone’s been saying.  Microsoft’s a fucking cheap-ass company for providing only a THREE-MONTH warranty out of the box.  You get a pamphlet in the box providing you with a “special offer” to extend your warranty to 2 years for an extra $60.  The kicker? You can only send in the offer within 10 DAYS of buying the XBox.  What kind of crap is that?!?!

 

Physically, it’s a pretty nice looking console and the wireless controllers work nice.  The headset actually plugs into the bottom of the controller which is much better than the old PS2 way of plugging it to the main unit.  There’s a ring around the power button that’s split into 4 quadrants.  Each one lights up for a corresponding controller starting from the upper left.  The controller itself is pretty comfy although not having played an XBox on a regular basis before, the alternated locations for the D-pad and the left analog stick takes some getting used to.  It comes with a dual component/RCA cable and you can plug a digital audio cable into it as well.

 

Once on, you go through a few setup screens.  No biggie.  The 360’s definitely more of an entertainment center than the PS2 since there’s a lot more stuff you can do without having a game on.  If you install a piece of software on your PCs you can actually stream photos and music from your PC to the XBox so it slideshows on your tv or plays the music.  Pretty nice.  Unfortunately, no video.  Video only plays from the hard drive.  I need to find out how to copy files to the HD.  Anyway, when you’re installing the software on your PC, it tries to automatically find the XBox on the network for you.  Typical of MS, this doesn’t work.  So I had to specify a couple of shared folders on the PC and then connect to it from the XBox.

 

Now to the good stuff, the graphics.  At first, I wasn’t THAT impressed with it while playing PGR3.  The car model didn’t seem to be THAT much better and the scenery of the test course was alright but not stunning.  But once you started racing in the cities, then you start noticing the really detailed backgrounds.  The car model still isn’t all that but the scenery’s great!  Except for the test track.  ;-p

 

However, Dead or Alive 4, WOW.  I don’t think I’m even going to play this game.  There’s a mode where you just select 2 characters (or 4 in tag-team fashion) and a backdrop and watch them fight.  The kicker is that there’s a high-speed action camera view that’s like watching a freakin’ fight scene in a movie (complete with slow-mos during key moves) that doesn’t end until you want it to.  It’s AWESOME!  There’s no way I can remember all the moves for the characters so why bother when it looks so much better when the computer fights.  =)  And the scenery is pretty damn gorgeous.  And interactive too.  You can get hit by a car (or have the driver curse at you on a near-miss) while fighting on the Vegas strip or run over by stampeding animals in the savannah.  It’s pretty wicked.

 

I also picked up Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter and man, this is the most impressive one of the lot.  Not only is the environment pretty much life-like, the character models are probably the most detailed out of all the games so far.  It’s really damn cool.  Controls take a while to figure out but the computer AI is pretty super.  Enemy aren’t dumbasses and neither are your squadmates.  They actually take cover on their own when under fire instead of stupidly standing around while getting their asses kicked.  But this game needs to be seen to be believed.