The reason is that I found it for a reasonable price in a sale - £180 for the "premium" edition (20GB hard drive), bundled with 3 games I don't really care about but might play anyway. :D It's a special deal on play.com in their current sale. I heard the price has dropped in the US and Australia, and there are rumours that the 20GB model might be replaced by a 60GB model... but I thought now is a good enough time. The few games that I'm interested in have been out for a while and have dropped in price, and Microsoft have become better with their standard warranty because they acknowledge there is a design flaw killing them.
So far... I haven't connected it to a network because I seem to have misplaced the power supply for my network router, and I can't get the wireless joypad it comes with to work. T_T The lights just flash at me. T_T But, I have a USB joystick so I plugged that in instead. :)
It doesn't come with the cables to plug it into my super-nice Samsung XL20 monitor which could show HDTV at native resolutions, so I plugged it into an old Atari ST monitor via SCART. Hey, it still looks good enough for me. The console seems bigger than the screen, though! ^_^;;
All I've done so far is entered a player name in my profile, and started up a game - Dynasty Warriors Gundam. I suppose I ought to watch some of those series so games like this have more meaning, and so I don't accidentally witness any series spoilers. Oh well, I don't really mind.
It asked me to choose somewhere to save games to - I don't have any memory cards so I selected the hard drive. "11.1GB free" it said. WHAT? I thought this was a 20GB hard drive! So why isn't there 20GB free? T_T
I noticed in the options, you can select voices - Japanese or English. So I clicked "Japanese". "Amuro Ikkimaaaaaaaasu!" it said. ^_^ That made me smile; it never seems right to have a Gundam game if you can't hear him say that. "Cool! It says something when you switch over languages!" I thought, and clicked "English" to see what it would do. A woman's voice said: "I... I'm sorry...", and that just made me laugh. Aw, it's not your fault you're not Furuya Tohru! I didn't really mean it! XD
