I picked mine up at about 11:50, one and a half hours late because the banks screwed up a money transfer for me, and I had to spend a lot of time trying to find out what the heck happened, and then standing in line withdrawing cash from my savings account to make up for the lack on my card account.
Along with the premium version, I got an extra joypad, teh wifi adapter and, due to lack of other interesting titles, the limited collector's edition of PD0 in a black tin can. As price was the same as the standard version it was a no-brainer picking this version. Anyway, all that apparantly differs is the packaging, and a making-of disc that I haven't checked out yet.
After unpacking the thing - and getting annoyed at Microsoft for some shoddy packaging - I started setting up the dashboard stuff, and my live account, all of which went fairly smoothly. USB keyboards are supported for text input, but it has no clue of different national key maps, so whenever I try to type an accented character I get brackets and shit instead... Meh.
My impression of the hardware so far is a bit mixed, but overall positive. It's evident MS isn't really used to design consumer electronics. The aircraft carrier-sized harddrive thing sitting on top of the console (assuming it's vertical) for starters looks just plain bad, and on my particular unit, the standard celluloid tape that protected the sheen on the metal siding left A LOT of glue remains when pulled off that refused to be easily removed! GAAHHH. The harddrive should absolutely have been INTERNAL. No point in having it sit schlepped on top in a plasticy-looking tub that looks completely different to the rest of the console.
Second thing that makes me scratch my head is MS's decision to have the extremely thick video cable, along with optical out, rear USB port and ethernet jack to sit at the top of the unit when vertical. That's just plain incompetent design. Look at PS2 and PS3. Cable jacks located at the bottom half of the unit.
Well, at least the power cable is at the bottom... Lol... Jesus christ. One could power a city block with that thing! It even locks in place with two small plastic hooks. At least it'll stay in the socket! Monster-sized power brick is cool, IMO. Literally. It gets just slightly warm for me, no sign of extreme heating. It also looks fairly unobtrusive, I have it sitting next to my x360 so I can see the neato green LED.
Component cable is mighty impressive. Very solid, but having the optical cable hanging down across the rear fan-vent along with everything else again speaks of MS's lacking experience. They made the casing concave this time so it won't look so fugly and copied sony's vertical concept, but didn't think it all through. Tsk, tsk. While I'm complaining, I might as well mention the dumb hatch on the front covering the USB ports. Point of that being...? Assume I want a wifi adapter - which occupies the rear port - and the XBL camera, that hatch's going to be permanently open and looking fugly. Not to mention all the poor bastards with wired controllers... MS should have just put the ports on the case itself and not bothered with the stupid cover thingy.
Sound level wise, the fans aren't all that LOUD really, but they have a fairly noticeable and slightly grating sound frequency which makes the sound level more intrusive than might perhaps have been the case using other fans. Not sure if it's the console itself or the PSU that is the culprit, I'll have to investigate... Soundwise as well, the DVDROM lacks a rubber seal around the tray like NEC for example equips its units with. This is fairly effective in keeping at least some noise inside the drive. And the eject button is also very stiff. Stiff to the point of making the console slide backwards when pushed if the console is horizontal I would think. Another fairly ill-thought-out design decision ergonomics-wise IMO. Not that I really plan to use it all that often, but still. Oh well, at least the chrome detailing on the premium unit looks cool!
Booting up the machine doesn't really take me back with graphics splendor. The X logo looks alright as it flies around a bit, I can see some color banding on the sphere up close, probably 16-bit buffer rounding errors. He he. Just kidding.
CD player and the Jeff Minter-designed VLM thingy is alright. Nothing spectacular, I really expected more I must say, AVS on good ol' Winamp can do so much more by a competent preset designer. Of course this thing runs monster fast in comparison and at monster rez (720P at the moment). AVS chugs badly at high rez as experienced AVS afficionados know only too well, but sometimes there is curious slowdown anyway in the VLM despite all the processing horsepower in the 360.
Geometry Wars is crazy. I just had to buy some stupid MS points and purchase this game... Actually, Geometry Wars is NUTS. Extremely impressive, and if just a small example of what we can expect from xenon/xenos particle power, then we can expect great things indeed! There's stuff flying around ALL OVER the screen!
Actually, GW is the only actual game I've played so far on my 360. I did scope out that racing game whatsitscalled, PGR something, at an EB Games store and it didn't impress me much. They do some kind of motion blur thing on the edges of the screen, but framerate looks a bit shite, particulary on reflections on the cars, and there's pretty bad texture aliasing in the game as well in a few cases (barriers on the sides of the london city level), and slightly less obvious aliasing on the shadows over the road surface. Clumsy. Rushed title. I won't buy.
Oh! And the controller is also really heavy! Man, I thought some of you said it was lighter than the S-controller. What's that one made of then, tungsten compared to the 360's lead? Heh! Now I'm gonna play some more GW, and then load up PD0 and check that out. I'll post again if my console overheats and crashes!
Along with the premium version, I got an extra joypad, teh wifi adapter and, due to lack of other interesting titles, the limited collector's edition of PD0 in a black tin can. As price was the same as the standard version it was a no-brainer picking this version. Anyway, all that apparantly differs is the packaging, and a making-of disc that I haven't checked out yet.
After unpacking the thing - and getting annoyed at Microsoft for some shoddy packaging - I started setting up the dashboard stuff, and my live account, all of which went fairly smoothly. USB keyboards are supported for text input, but it has no clue of different national key maps, so whenever I try to type an accented character I get brackets and shit instead... Meh.
My impression of the hardware so far is a bit mixed, but overall positive. It's evident MS isn't really used to design consumer electronics. The aircraft carrier-sized harddrive thing sitting on top of the console (assuming it's vertical) for starters looks just plain bad, and on my particular unit, the standard celluloid tape that protected the sheen on the metal siding left A LOT of glue remains when pulled off that refused to be easily removed! GAAHHH. The harddrive should absolutely have been INTERNAL. No point in having it sit schlepped on top in a plasticy-looking tub that looks completely different to the rest of the console.
Second thing that makes me scratch my head is MS's decision to have the extremely thick video cable, along with optical out, rear USB port and ethernet jack to sit at the top of the unit when vertical. That's just plain incompetent design. Look at PS2 and PS3. Cable jacks located at the bottom half of the unit.
Well, at least the power cable is at the bottom... Lol... Jesus christ. One could power a city block with that thing!
It even locks in place with two small plastic hooks. At least it'll stay in the socket! Monster-sized power brick is cool, IMO. Literally. It gets just slightly warm for me, no sign of extreme heating. It also looks fairly unobtrusive, I have it sitting next to my x360 so I can see the neato green LED.Component cable is mighty impressive. Very solid, but having the optical cable hanging down across the rear fan-vent along with everything else again speaks of MS's lacking experience. They made the casing concave this time so it won't look so fugly and copied sony's vertical concept, but didn't think it all through. Tsk, tsk. While I'm complaining, I might as well mention the dumb hatch on the front covering the USB ports. Point of that being...? Assume I want a wifi adapter - which occupies the rear port - and the XBL camera, that hatch's going to be permanently open and looking fugly. Not to mention all the poor bastards with wired controllers... MS should have just put the ports on the case itself and not bothered with the stupid cover thingy.
Sound level wise, the fans aren't all that LOUD really, but they have a fairly noticeable and slightly grating sound frequency which makes the sound level more intrusive than might perhaps have been the case using other fans. Not sure if it's the console itself or the PSU that is the culprit, I'll have to investigate... Soundwise as well, the DVDROM lacks a rubber seal around the tray like NEC for example equips its units with. This is fairly effective in keeping at least some noise inside the drive. And the eject button is also very stiff. Stiff to the point of making the console slide backwards when pushed if the console is horizontal I would think. Another fairly ill-thought-out design decision ergonomics-wise IMO. Not that I really plan to use it all that often, but still. Oh well, at least the chrome detailing on the premium unit looks cool!
Booting up the machine doesn't really take me back with graphics splendor. The X logo looks alright as it flies around a bit, I can see some color banding on the sphere up close, probably 16-bit buffer rounding errors. He he. Just kidding.
CD player and the Jeff Minter-designed VLM thingy is alright. Nothing spectacular, I really expected more I must say, AVS on good ol' Winamp can do so much more by a competent preset designer. Of course this thing runs monster fast in comparison and at monster rez (720P at the moment). AVS chugs badly at high rez as experienced AVS afficionados know only too well, but sometimes there is curious slowdown anyway in the VLM despite all the processing horsepower in the 360.
Geometry Wars is crazy. I just had to buy some stupid MS points and purchase this game... Actually, Geometry Wars is NUTS. Extremely impressive, and if just a small example of what we can expect from xenon/xenos particle power, then we can expect great things indeed! There's stuff flying around ALL OVER the screen!
Actually, GW is the only actual game I've played so far on my 360.
I did scope out that racing game whatsitscalled, PGR something, at an EB Games store and it didn't impress me much. They do some kind of motion blur thing on the edges of the screen, but framerate looks a bit shite, particulary on reflections on the cars, and there's pretty bad texture aliasing in the game as well in a few cases (barriers on the sides of the london city level), and slightly less obvious aliasing on the shadows over the road surface. Clumsy. Rushed title. I won't buy.Oh! And the controller is also really heavy! Man, I thought some of you said it was lighter than the S-controller. What's that one made of then, tungsten compared to the 360's lead? Heh! Now I'm gonna play some more GW, and then load up PD0 and check that out. I'll post again if my console overheats and crashes!
