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"Musings from a new 360 owner."

"Hmmmmm".

That basically describes my initial reaction to my Premium 360 (or whatever the harddrive ones are called). Me andm y mate hunted around looking for the best deal in town, we found a Core for £178 in Blockbuster with no games or offers and laughed at Woolie's pitiful attempts to put together a 'deal' for a premium with game at 260-something. We finally ended up going for the HMV '3 Games with a premium console' deal and got an extra controller too all for just over £300.

So I get it home and well... it's tiny next to the old Xbox! :D Quite impressed with the ridiculous power brick I'd heard so much about too.

When we picked the games we were heavily veering towards multiplayer titles so we got Ghost Recon:AW, Perfect Dark and Moto GP 2006.

Jumping straight into multiplayer of Perfect Dark the experience was rather 'so-so', it's really dumbed down and half the modes can't even have bots. Still atleast the aiming and accuracy was of the right standard and the bots were significantly troubling in our first few goes, even if they are really dumb in the 'hold the zone/zones' territories mode.

So I threw a lot of bots into a big two team battle and it was a lot of fun (if a little short as 18 combatants trying to get 50 kills a side doesn't take very long) and I unlocked a few achievements.

Then it was on to Moto GP which I brezzed through in multiplayer managing to get consistent first places after the first three races or so, thankfully there were other racers to race against although my friend couldn't get to grips with it a and had to settle for the back 2 places pretty much everytime! Extreme mode made it even easier and everything was fun enough, I'm going to play it some more today and see how it goes because if it's not all that fun in multiplayer then I may trade it in for Hitman: Bloodmoney as I think at the moment I'll get more fun out of Eidos' title.

Then we went onto Warfighter and played a 30 min 1 on 1 battle which never got dull and seemed to only take about 12 minutes. :D

Admittedly I haven't played any of these in single player yet but I have to say none of them have blown me away or made we go 'Wow this really is next-gen gaming', infact they really seem to be more of the same just with slightly nicer graphics.

That said, compared to the early days of the Cube when I had to deal with AUF, Monkey Ball, Burnout, Smash Bros and (OMG) Legends of Wrestling the 360's early titles are way way better.

Now I just have to play Moto GP a bit more and decide if Bloodmoney's where it's really at...

More stuff to say once I've properly got to grips with (or even started) the single player modes.

(Oh and as for the 'exclusive content' on the premium's HD, that's a bit of a joke surely? There's next to nothing on there!)

Yeah, need to keep some for Oblivion extras too.

Edit: which'll use 650 points n'all! :D

Geometery Wars is great, but wait for Lumines Live coming soon. The marble game is pretty cool though.

You might want to think about using some of the points for extra maps on GRAW though...

Went onto GRAW's single player today, very mixed results.

Good:

The way you can hit the floor running - very nice.

Going round with a rocket launcher seriously rules.

Ordering helicopters about is good


Bad:

Trying to play tactically by finding alternative routes tends to end in "DON'T LEAVE THE BATTLE AREA!!!111" messages.

It'd be better if the mission's were seamlessly linked via the cutscenes, it seems like they're not far off being seamless but they weren't quite able to pull it off.

Enemies always seem to know where you are, whereas your team mates don't seem to have a clue, they won't react to many things realistically. If you duck then half the time they'll stay standing and get wasted.

The don't seem to cover in a clock formation the way many squads do. Close Combat really has the edge here.

The training didn't tell me how to order the guys about individually, I bloody hope they can be as having three guys hiding behind a tiny bus shelter just looks really stupid.




Anyway I'm on mission 4 so far, really should look up how to order the guys about individually because it really makes the game look stupid next to the Conflict series and Close Combat: First to Fight.

Properly sat down for some Ghost Recon 1 vs 1 and was promptly wowed by the beach level (yes at last).

Found Perfect Dark's 20 quid secondhand so traded it in for Oblivion, also traded in Moto GP for Hitman: Bloodmoney.

Looks like we'll be focusing on GR:AW for the multi for now. :)

Got through the co-op of the first level and also played a heap of co-op firefight battles which are damn fine.

Picked up 2100 MS points with a view to getting some Live Arcade titles, going to play the demos and see, expect I'll get the cheap ones to make the points go further.

Any recommendations for Live Arcade titles? I quite like Geometry Wars but I've played a much better game like it about 10 years ago on my RISC PC (Spheres of Chaos), Crystal Quest seems fun but Feeding Frenzy doesn't seem worth the 800 pts. Outpost Kaloki has me interested. Astro Pop should be 400 pts as 800 is silly for what it is.

Anyway, good stuff. :)

Well I must say that PD0 (hehe still laugh at the abbreviation) is "sweet as" in single player. The whole aiming system and the general feel of the game is very much Rare's engine and that's the solid feeling engine with a decent level of accuracy that I grew up playing the best FPS shooters on.

For some reason the Unreal engines never felt as precise, fluid or nimble. Playing a game using the unreal engine is like plodding around with wellington boots on whereas Rare's engine is like something far more maneouverable and natural.

It's weird though because design-wise the levels have a very 'square' look to them, suits me fine though as it gives it a nice Deus Ex style and considering all the neon and futuristic stuff in the game it all gels together decently.

Chuffed.

Not all the live titles but most of them, I doubt Crash n' Burn's been patched yet. If it does I can forsee some big reunion tournaments between a few clans...

Any idea if system link games between a 360 and a normal Xbox are possible? :D

Thankfully most of the system link modes are Live modes anyway but a few aren't (Deathrow, Brute Force etc).

At least you can download the patch to play all your old titles on the new Xbox now.

(or by the current OXM 360 mag, which has them all on the disc)

But, yeah, the only reason to have Perfect Dark is for the online games, really.

I've got:
Perfect Dark Zero
Burnout 4
PGR 3
Full Auto
Tomb Raider
Table Tennis
Dead Or Alive 4
Kameo
Ridge Racer

but little time to play them at the moment...

It going to be an interesting battle.

I still have a load of original Xbox titles to get through and I've recently got a load of second copies of Live titles for the two Xboxes I have in my room at the moment.

So it comes down to a choice of new 360 Live titles with just me or playing them via splitscreen OR setting up the two Xboxes for seperate screens and a proper online setup for two players.

I think generally when my friend's round to play Live it'll be the two Xboxes that win, although I do have it setup so I can split my TV signal to two TV's...

Playing as a guest is going to be a short novelty I think, especially when the second Xbox copy of Revenge turns up...

Yeah there are more games than I can count on all my fingers and toes that are greatly improved by their Live modes.

Getting my broadband connection setup again very shortly (supposed to be today but nobody's turned up yet to double check the line).

I think Perfect Dark should be a good Live title (not sure if it'll be 'great' but I don't think I've even played all the multiplayer levels yet and I hear there's more on Live too!) and I'm going to give Moto GP more of a chance, I've been playing it a lot this morning and it's quite fun but it has that 'Microsoft Soul-less Template' feel to it where it's left up to the user to put any sort of real personality into the game via custom options and playing it over Live etc.

Anyway if they're both poor then I'll just make sure I exchange them before my 21 days are up. :)

Can't see Advanced Warfighter being bad though and I doubt PD is either, just taking my time getting round to playing the single player. :D

The Live Arcade game on the hard drive is pretty addictive and you have your silver account to add to that.

But I think the 360 experience is only really felt when you're online with it, with all the options open to you.

My MSN Space (at http://pbyron.spaces.msn.com/) pretty much sums up my experience from non-360 owner to proud owner.

oh, and my xbox live gamertag is pb live, just to remind you!