XBOX 360 First Impressions (Part II)

Here we are again with our impressions concerning our shiny, new XBOX 360.

One of the main reasons I've wanted the 360 was for Oblivion. I've played all the Elder Scrolls games on the PC and heard that the 360 version was "made for" the 360. I admit being a little apprehensive, formerly a firm defender of PC gaming - especially for RPGs of the first person type. I have never truly enjoyed first person games (shooters or otherwise) on console machines because I am a keyboard/mouse combo junky. I enjoy have a full range of motion that I can control the speed of. Using a joystick, you are a slave to its speed and impreciceness. This problem has led to many deaths in Halo and other shooter games. After a few hours of Oblivion, I was relieved to find that the controller worked very well with the game. It was a little more difficult to perform true thrusting and lunging moves, but once learned, the action was actually more pleasing and exciting using a controller than I believe it would have been with a mouse and keyboard.

We also have Need For Speed: Most Wanted, MLB 2006, Call of Duty 2, and Tomb Raider Legend. All of these games look amazing, especially MLB. The players look as if you are watching a telecast of a baseball game. Oblivion is alive and quite scary in the dungeons. We have the machine hooked up to a 32" tube television (a very high quality one) and everything looks great!

We turned on XBOX Live to see what all of the fuss was about. The Silver service basically allows you to get XBOX updates and game patches. That's it. You can't play any of the games (to my knowledge) with other people without signing up for a Gold account. Since the 360 system comes with a free month of Gold, we enabled that. We were a bit dismayed to see that any extra content (outside of patches) would cost more money, on top of the Live charges. Oblivion, for example, had new content (horse armor) for about $3. Buying new content on Live consists of spending points. You can buy points online or from retail gaming outlets. Twenty dollars buys about 1600 points. Most of the useful things are over 500 points. Features like themes (based on sports teams, etc) are 150 points. Most of the downloadable content is simply fluff, but some things, like the Microsoft Arcade games, aren't too bad of a deal.