The 360 Effect

I’ve waited and watched, patiently sitting in the shadows while the rest of the Western world

enjoyed next generation gaming, courtesy of Microsoft’s Xbox 360.

I knew my day would come; only I didn’t think it would come this soon. It was just another routine day at work and I was sitting at my desk, staring intently at my PC (so not pretending to work*cough*) when I heard loud screams coming from below. At first I thought someone was getting fired (or murdered), but it wasn’t until I heard my name being shouted, did I bolt down two steps at a time; and there she was, packed all pretty sitting in front of my very own eyes; the 360 in the mother***** house. I know I may sound a bit dramatic, but I couldn’t help, I was as excited as Michael Jackson in a kindergarten class.

So we (and by we I mean the entire team) go into our studio and plug it in into our 42 inch HD TV (perks of working at CNBC). One small thing before I continue though; the 360 will work on your regular TVs but has been optimized to work best with high definition TVs so if you find your 360 games looking pretty similar to Xbox games, don’t freak out, change your TV.

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As soon as we plugged the 360 into our TV and hit the power switch, the first thing that caught my fancy is how different the interface is from the previous generation; it’s sleek, stylish and very appealing to the eye. Next, I dove head-first into the cardboard packing to see which games were bundled with it, but deep down I knew I would be staring at Dead or Alive 4 very soon, and guess what, that’s exactly what happened.

I’m not a big fan of fighters, but since I had no choice, I booted the game up. Now in all honesty, the game looks gorgeous (especially in High definition) and plays pretty well too (it’s damn tough though). Characters are well detailed and animate fluidly, while environments look just as awesome and in true DoA fashion, certain parts of the arena can be destroyed to take the fight to the another area. I’m sure the game would be truly appreciated by a connoisseur of the genre, but I sure as hell wouldn’t spend nearly 3000 bucks on that game.

I rummaged through the packaging once again, morale dwindling like a candle that’s about to go out, to see if there was something I had missed, when I glanced upon another game; Perfect Dark Zero (PDZ). Whoa! An FPS, now that’s what I’m talking about. I did manage to spend a significant amount of time with that game so I’ll be talking about it in detail in our PDZ review… soon.

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Now, onto Xbox Live! The cool part here is that as and when you purchase the console you get a one month gold package absolutely free, which means you can download game/movie videos, demos, themes and so on free of cost for an entire month. As and when this free subscription ends, you can either renew your gold subscription for an annual fee of $ 50 (that’s nearly 2400 bucks) or you can go ahead and sign up for the silver package, which is totally free.

Now all this is fine and dandy, but signing up to Xbox Live is not easy task; you need lots and lots of patience because you’ll have to answer a never ending barrage of questions and typing in your name, MSN passport, IP Address, DNS (Domain Name Server) blah blah blah is a cumbersome process with the controller (yes I know, we could have plugged in a keyboard, but you have to understand our excitement permitted us to think rationally).

Once that long and tedious journey of signing up is over, it’s a smooth ride all the way as you can hit the Xbox Live Marketplace to download all the above mentioned stuff or trial versions of the arcade games like Geometry Wars, Uno and so on.

I know I haven’t mentioned how sleek the console looks or how bulky the adapter is, or how customizable the faceplate (which we yet have to get by the way) is but these things were universally known facts so I don’t think repeating them would make sense.

In the end, no matter how good all this sounds, I really wouldn’t recommend purchasing the 360 as of now, because first of all (and this is the most important reason) you will not be able to achieve the optimum visual level unless and until you have a HDTV, which we all know costs as much as cars nowadays. Secondly, games are really expensive and we unfortunately don’t have any sort of service here that allows us to rent them. You could wile away your time by downloading demos (provided you have good speeds as most of them are 500 MB upwards), but rest assured, you will get bored of them in like a day. Sure, you could listen to music or watch a DVD but I really don’t think you’d pay Rs 20,000 to do just that right?

My suggestion would to be to wait and watch and take a call only when MS launches the console, Xbox Live and a healthy library of games this Diwali.