Inbox features items that I have recently purchased or received.
Hardware covers the technology of game playing, whether PC, consoles or figurines on a board.
In the spring of 2010, Microsoft released one of their best bundles for their Xbox 360 yet: one with the improved Jasper motherboard, which reduced the failure rate of their hardware to regular consumer electronics levels. Furthermore, copies of Forza 3 and Halo: ODST were bundled with it, two Xbox 360 exclusives that were fairly well received. Perhaps the best Xbox 360 bundle yet.
And then I found it on sale for $250, so, I couldn't resist and purchased it. The Xbox 360 Elite is a fairly slick device and bears a black matte finish. It medium sized, but has a huge power brick, which fortunately has enough slack to hide it under the entertainment cabinet instead of within it. It comes with a controller and a standard AV cable. It does not have wireless internet unlike its console peers, the Nintendo Wii and the Sony Playstation 3 and it bears a 10/100 Ethernet port. A wireless adapter can be purchased separately for $100 (!). The included hard drive is 120GB and proprietary, so you have to purchase a Microsoft branded hard drive in order to replace or upgrade and the Microsoft ones are pricey per gigabyte. Oh, it also doesn't come with an HDMI cable (?!), but that puts it on par with its equally stingy PS3 peer.
I previously wrote about the Xbox 360 controller and my comments stand for the wireless version, whose only notable different is the battery pack on its underside, which accepts AA batteries or a charging pack. The system also comes with a headset, which is a rather cheap plastic over the head thing and plugs into the controller via a mini-jack. A wireless headset is available for $70 (with a much lower street price), but reviews don't treat it kindly. I'm hoping that you can replace the headset with any other non-proprietary wired headset made for mobile phones.
The system software itself is pretty slick, although I hear that's it's undergone many changes since its inception to make it more user friendly. It has a task oriented interface and while some parts of it are littered with ads, it's pretty intuitive in terms of finding what you want to do. They've also added an avatar system for your profile and the cartoony avatar is nice and as useful as Nintendo's Mii's, while more customizable (although it looks like many of the customizations require some form of micropayments). One thing I particularly like is that the Xbox 360, despite its networking hardware weaknesses, is very attuned to being an online device on the software side, complimented by a bevy of online tools and programs and robust interactive tools to help you chat with your friends, compete with them and play with them. While the Live Gold service does cost $50 a year (you can buy yearly membership cards for cheaper if you buy them at retail), the service is a head above the PS3's free service and light years beyond what Nintendo has to offer. Besides the price, the other gripe would be that the Microsoft points system isn't a 1:1 (PSN), 10:1, 100:1 (Nintendo) or even 1:1000 ratio, but rather uses a strange 80:1 ratio for points to the dollar, possibly to obfuscate how much money any person is spending on the service.
However, in a bit of a silly story, just a couple weeks after I purchased this Elite and set it up, Microsoft announced and released a new Xbox 360 Elite, with a smaller form factor, lower power requirements (including a smaller power brick), included wireless networking (!!) and a 250GB (but still proprietary) hard drive. In the meantime, they've reduced the price on the older Elite models to $250, which means that I didn't save any money at all. Boo.
While the 2010 Spring bundle comes with Forza 3 and Halo:ODST (approximately a $60 value, based on current prices for these games), I think that the additional $50 spent for the new Elite easily outstrips the value of the added games, so if you're still in the market for the system, I'd ignore the old and pick up the new.
As for me, I'm not too sore about it, as I still paid the "normal" price for the 2010 Spring bundle and after adding a switch and a very long Ethernet cable to my setup, I don't need wireless anymore. Furthermore, I can now play all the Xbox exclusive games I've been missing out on. Granted, I could've played most of them (or at least the ones I cared about) on the PC, but the DRM restrictions for PCs are often brutal and turned me away from non-exclusive PC games, with the exception of a few genres that are better played on the PC.
All in all, the 360 Elite (fat) is a fine system with (what I hope to find are) some very fine games. In terms of hardware the old model lags behind the PS3 (both fat and slim, with the exception of the old 20GB PS3), but the new Xbox 360 Elite looks like an able competitor to the PS3 slim even though I think I prefer certain design decisions of the PS3 console a little more. But the 360 has the superior controller. The Xbox 360 has the superior system software, especially because of its excellent online strength, which makes me like it more than the PS3 or Wii, despite the fact that it's a pay to play service.
However, when it comes to consoles, I don't really think that the strength and design of the hardware is the real driving force behind having the system. It's important, but the real driving force is games and the 360 seems to have enough exclusive games to warrant owning, just as the other two systems do as well. So, my recommendation is, look at the games for the system--if there are any you see that are "must-play" then get a 360, and if you want a 360, ignore the 2010 spring bundle that I purchased and go straight for the superior new 360 Elite (slim). 7/10.
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