The Richter Scale^®

I’m pretty sure I was the first person on the island of Bonaire to have an Xbox 360. It arrived at 5pm on Thanksgiving Day, November 24th (not a holiday on Bonaire, since the island is Dutch, not American). I had ordered the high end “all inclusive” Omega pack from GameStop.com a few months back and had it shipped to my in-laws in New Hampshire. They received it on Tuesday, November 22nd and turned it right around to ship to me on Bonaire via FedEx. Not the cheapest way to go, but certainly the most efficient (other than flying it down in person).

After we had finished Thanksgiving dinner, my kids and I set the console up. I plugged it into the VGA/PC connector on my Samsung DLP display, attached the wireless adapter, turned it on and lo, it worked!

However, the set up was horribly tedious, as I decided I wanted to have the thing configured properly for Xbox Live as well. If this is Microsoft’s idea of a console for the masses, they haven’t a clue as to what the masses will put up with to, I think. My 10 year old daughter finally gave up watching me enter data via the on-screen keyboard and went to bed. My 8-year old son, bless him, was patient enough to bear witness to the completion of the set-up and even play a game with me.

One major annoyance was that I could not use an existing Passport.net account when setting up the system, and woe to anyone ordinary mortal who only has one e-mail address and an existing Xbox console that they have registered. I happen to run a web hosting provider and have an unlimited number of e-mail addresses I can use or generate, but that’s a rare thing out there.

The other annoyance was that using an on-screen virtual keyboard is a royal pain in the butt when having to fill out page after page of forms. Would have been a lot nicer to either be able to plug a PC keyboard into the box and type on that (and it may be possible to do it via the USB connectors), but no suggestion was made by the Xbox to do so. Or, alternately, allowing one to do all the data entry on a PC via a web site, and then just punching in a few codes on the Xbox 360 to finalize the set-up. But I persevered and got it done.

Of the dozen and a half games I got with the system, my son decided that we should try King Kong (I pretty much ruled out Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, Condemned, GUN, and Quake 4 as being inappropriate for him) as our first game. The graphics were pretty decent, but not awe-inspiring. I had configured the Xbox 360 for the highest resolution the DLP display would support, and it did a good job crisply filling the display (although the Samsung DLP does not show PC output as completely full screen, for some reason - there was a small black border all the way around the image).

We didn’t play for long as my son had school the next day (as my wife came to remind me at 10pm).

I stayed up and playing about a half hour each of Call of Duty 2, Perfect Dark, GUN, and Quake 4. Enjoyed them all in various ways. However, Microsoft’s highly touted efforts back in March at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Francisco to make the use of the controller, and more particularly, the use of particular controls universally the same across games apparently didn’t make it to production. Everyone of the five games used different variations of buttons to fire various weapons, etc. Movement seemed to be the only thing more or less universally constant, but that tends to be the case on other consoles too.

I must say, I love the responsiveness of the new wireless controllers, and the wireless-ness is great too. But the “Charge & Play” cable idea just plain sucks. I don’t want a cable connecting my wireless controller to the Xbox 360, plus it never seems to charge the battery to the point of getting a green “I’m fully charged” light (and it doesn’t consistently charge the battery when the Xbox 360 is off). The suggestion in the documentation to use a quick charger for the rechargable battery is a good one, but no one is selling these quick chargers!

Anyhow, the next morning I got the Media Extender functionality running, but not without further hassles, like having to reinstalled aspects of Media Center Edition 2005 on my Windows MCE-based computer. The link the Xbox 360 provided for the MCE extension software for my PC did not help.

I’ll have many more comments forthcoming, but in summary from initial impressions, the Xbox 360 is not worth the high premium one presently has to pay. The graphics are good, the game play is good (for the few Xbox 360 games out there now), but the game selection is poor (especially for games kids can play), and set-up is horrific (if you want Xbox Live).

On The Richter Scale, I give the Xbox 360 a 6.5 out of 10.0.