At Home with John and Debbie

As my reward for cooking and washing up throughout Debbie’s exam marking season, on Saturday I bought an Xbox 360. There are reviews of the 360 all over the place, so I’ll keep my first impressions brief.

I got the premium pack - with a hard drive and a wireless controller included. The Core alternative isn’t really recommended, and I wasn’t inclined to wait for the forthcoming Elite and pay the extra money it would cost.

The package is pleasingly complete, with video cables for both HD and standard definition, and an ethernet cable included. Wireless networking is extra however. The power adapter is amusingly “industrial”: big, heavy, with a serious looking plug on the console end.

Setup is pretty simple. It’s important to get the machine on the Internet, because registering with Xbox Live adds vastly to the experience. Registering was easy, by using the same details I use for MSN Messenger.

The first thing I did was try out the games I bought: Crackdown and Gears of War. Both look outstanding in HD: Crackdown has a sharp cel-shaded cartoony look, showing detailed cityscapes over enormous distances. Gears of War goes for more realism, with beautifully textured architecture. Gears looks most impressive, but Crackdown is the one I suspect I’ll play most.

Almost immediately, even playing these single player games, the genius of Xbox Live becomes apparent. A few minutes into Gears of War, a message pops up: “Prison Breakout: Completed tutorial level on any skill level”. This is an “achievement”, and it is recorded to the Xbox Live service. I can view all my achievements using the Xbox or any Web browser (and you can too). They contribute to a lifetime “Gamerscore”, and I suspect this will really keep me playing.

I pored through my mail archives, to find friends’ Xbox Live user names, and added them as friends. This lets me compare my paltry day’s worth of Achievements with their huge numbers gained over a year or more. Later, I expect to play online with them.

I poked around the “Dashboard”, Xbox’s interface when you’re not playing a game. This revealed game demo downloads and Xbox Live Arcade - I downloaded a demo for “Dead Rising” and a trial game of “Bomberman Live”". What’s the difference between a demo and a trial game, you might ask? A demo is a downloadable piece of software containing an extract from a full game you can buy on disk. The disk version will contain an awful lot more data, more features, more content, all the stuff you expect from a full game. A trial game is slightly different: you download a complete game for free, but it is crippled until you pay to unlock it. For example, I can only play one level of Bomberman with default settings, until I spend some money to unlock the remaining levels, game modes, achievements, etc.

In looking for Bomberman Live, I discovered that the console had come with a Live Arcade game pre-installed. “Hexic” is a simple match-the-blocks-to-destroy-them puzzle game. It’s a small confection, but I had a couple of hours entertaininment from it (and some Achievement points), and am surprised that its inclusion isn’t advertised on the box. There was also a demo of Project Gotham Racing 2 pre-installed on the disk.

I played a little with its media playing capabilities. I was anticipating a lot from the Jeff Minter music visualiser, and was a little underwhelmed. It’s certainly very pretty, but I struggled to see how the visuals related to the music. I’ve found the visualisations in Xbox Media Player (freeware for the hacked Xbox 1) to be better in this respect. Maybe it’s time to retreat from working on ever more impressive graphics, and concentrate on algorithms to analyse the music more cleverly?

I was able to rip a CD to the Xbox drive, and accidentally discovered that it would continue to play the ripped music while I played a game of Hexic. Nifty — although I couldn’t find out how to control the music without ending my game (Edit: apparently the “Guide button” in the middle of the controller pauses the game and returns you to the dashboard, where you can control things like music).

All in all I’m very impressed so far.

I haven’t discussed the games in any great detail — they deserve more play first. I suspect Crackdown will consume a lot of my time.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 6th, 2007 at 10:01 and is filed under Video games. 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.