I'm surprised at how into the Xbox 360 I am. People go on about these big testosterone-fuelled games for the system, people-killing soldier games and things, which isn't my thing, but I've found games that I like - both the games you can buy in shops on shelves, and the ones that are available to download - full games and trials and demos. There's so much simple fun stuff on live arcade and having the games on the hard drive is very convenient.
That's a photo of my collection of Xbox 360 games so far. I also have a copy of the RPG "Lost Odyssey" coming in the post, and own 4 Xbox Live Arcade games - Space Giraffe, and three games that came free with my MadCatz joystick - Time Pilot, Frogger and Astro Pop.
(Astro Pop is a rip-off of Magical Drop in endless mode, the biggest real difference is that the player can sometimes use a special move. It's made by Popcap games)
I haven't played half those games. Hey, I haven't even played half of the old Xbox games either! (I own some FPS for Xbox just because I feel I ought to give the genre a go again... but it's low on my priority list)
My thoughts on High Definition gaming - I've plugged my Xbox into my super-nice monitor (I had to buy a new cable to do that), and now games look.... well, as good as PC games in 1280 x 1024 resolution. Considering that my normal desktop I use for windows is an effortless 1600 x 1200, I don't consider high definition very high. It means I can see more detail though, everything does look very nice, and for some games it means I can now read the on-screen text, whereas it was impossible to do so on normal TV-sized resolution (e.g. the instructions on how-to-play in the demo of Triggerheart Exelica).
Part of it is down to how wonderful my monitor is, I'm sure. ^_^ Hooray for the Samsung Syncmaster XL20! (I think I need to tweak the colour settings again, though...). It looks nicer than any HDTV I've ever had and there's no lag or weird side effects like you often see on LCD monitors. It's just perfect, doesn't get in the way of a good gaming experience. ^_^
The Xbox 360 is definitely more powerful than any PC I've ever owned or seen, so the extra detail it's possible to show is well utilised.
My thoughts on the interfaces. Well, I think that the Xbox marketplace interface, and the Xbox live website are both horrible to navigate properly. The game genre categorisation system is not useful, and if you know the name of a game but not the genre it's categorised as and want to find it, you pretty much have to browse all games and find it yourself. e.g. I want to find this "Pinball FX" game for a demo? What's that under? ...eventually I find it, and it's under "bar games". I didn't even know what that genre meant! Games categorised under the venue in which they were played - e.g. bar or arcade - aren't very helpful to describe the content of a game, or its gameplay. At least, I think so.
The Xbox website is flaky and hard to navigate. Half of it is in flash, so I can't open new tabs to read game descriptions or easily go back to read other ones.
The network for the console and website is also slow, even when I allow it full use of my internet connection. Browsing lists means loading up text and icons separately, and it takes ages, not letting me go further in the list until the current page has loaded all its icons and stuff I just want to skip past.
It's all just really badly thought out and annoying to use.
I also don't know how to remove my credit card details from my profile. I don't want it there! It's not safe! I'm automatically logged in just by switching on my console - so the card details are under that. If the console were stolen or whatever, that would leave it open for abuse. I'm busy playing games, I don't want my card tied to the account. But I bought some Microsoft points (to buy Space Giraffe and some Katamari levels), and the card details have been stored there ever since. T_T
The games are pretty fun, though.
