You don't own an XBox360. Why?

[bkilian]

I think Live, in and of itself, should be enough to incorporate into the cost of your console. Afterall, after 5 years of Live, you've added significantly to your investment.

I don't really agree with that. Sure, I have a Gold account, but I don't actually need one. Of the three people in my household, I'm the only one with a gold account, and I don't play online, pretty much at all. Netflix? I use it through my Tivo, much better interface. Getting stuff a week early? meh.

Last I saw someone on here worked out that roughly half of the Live members were paying members. That obviously shows that it's not a requirement.

It would be interesting to see how many WiFi adapters were sold too. I suspect less than a lot of folks on here would expect.

Why cant you imagine using wifi? My router is 80 feet from my TV. Wifi is so easy, and running cable under or thru the house isnt. Some people enjoy that type of thing, I am not one of these people. And not everyone needs to, some people have their 360 right next to their router. How they dont have it as standard, is silly to me. They are the leader in online gaming for consoles, and they dont have wifi. The Wii, the least online console has it, for $250 since day one.

Streaming was unusable? Something must have been wrong, thats been done for years on both consoles. I do it, again from 80 feet away. Movies, music, anything.

Sure you dont have to install games, you have the option for some, for faster load times. But not downloading demos? Ugh. Now thats something I couldnt imagine. New XBM? Need an installation for that too.

The 360 is obviously cheaper, and can play all the games with the Arcade unit. Im sure some people are perfectly happy with it like it is. And then some will want to update when they get more money. Yet, after you factor in the prices (for just two of the most common upgrades), its not cheaper. I dont know anyone with a 360 without a HD. And most have Wifi. Would you like rechargeable batteries? Well, pay up for those too.

My streaming problems have to do with having the TV and Router at opposite ends of the house, with 1 floor and two metal-embedded walls (the house ducting) between them, in an extremely EM noisy environment. I was lucky to stream a 128Kb MP3 without dropouts. I had huge packet loss due to Wifi interference and it was just unusable. As more and more people get Wifi, the interference can only get worse. I have had a lot less trouble since I upgraded to Wireless-N, but the xbox adapter or PS3 wouldn't support that anyway.

Also, there's no reason to buy the XBox Wifi adaptor. You can get a Wireless Gaming Adapter or a wireless bridge for $50, and not be beholden to the Wifi standards dictated by the console manufacturer. Especially since I have multiple items in my AV rack that need a net connection. (HD DVD player, Tivo, XBox)

The problem is we're judging the cost of the console by our over-the-top hardcore gamer concepts. We can't imagine not having Live Gold, but only 66% of the XBox owners even signed up for Live, and only roughly half those bought gold. We feel a hard drive is required, but high sales of the arcade version seem to indicate otherwise. Sure, maybe those folks eventually buy a hard drive, but they can buy a 20G for $35, or a 120G for $119, or even less if they're willing to brave ebay.

So your $100 + $100 is more like $76.99 (amazon) + $29 (ebay 20GB) or $65 (ebay 120GB).

 

[bkilian]

Don't own cuz most of the exclusives don't interest me, and there aren't even that many exclusives to begin with...

I used a friend's 360 for about a year while he was in China. Played some racers, Gears, Mass Effect. But I can get my racer fix on PC and my old Xbox. Mass Effect and Gears are on PC now. RE5 is coming to PC. Dead Space is on PC. Etc. Much prefer to play games on PC where they have a future with mods and performance improvement.

Don't care to pay to play online. I'm not much interested in competitive FPS gaming. My days of that were UT/Q3.

Don't like the micro transaction commercial feel to the Xbox Live stuff.

I spend most of my gaming time these days in various mod communities or playing old games.

All good reasons, so how much do you spend a year keeping your PC in a state to play the latest games? I haven't played a single game on the PC since I got my XBox, so mine was woefully underpowered for years, and even my recent upgrade I went for memory and a good CPU instead of a top of the line graphics card. There are probably games that wouldn't even deign to install on my machine

Luckily I far prefer playing games on a 50" kuro with full surround sound (which it needs to drown out the 360 fan, damn that thing is loud )

 

[obonicus]

Luckily I far prefer playing games on a 50" kuro with full surround sound (which it needs to drown out the 360 fan, damn that thing is loud )

Those aren't exclusive to consoles, though.

 

[Neb]

All good reasons, so how much do you spend a year keeping your PC in a state to play the latest games?

You know I spent roughly 1000$ almost one year ago for a high-end PC and it will last me for years. Heck it breaks any game without a sweat (including Crysis games) which forces me to take them beyond highest settings to make my PC atleast sweat a bit. And when 2-3 years have passed then the money I saved on buying the cheaper PC game versions will have netted me roughly 300-400$ for a nice free uppgrade.

 

[obonicus]

You know I spent roughly 1000$ almost one year ago for a high-end PC and it will last me for years. Heck it breaks any game without a sweat (including Crysis games) which forces me to take them beyond highest settings to make my PC atleast sweat a bit. And when 2-3 years have passed then the money I saved on buying the cheaper PC game versions will have netted me roughly 300-400$ for a nice free uppgrade.

Yeah, games ported from console to PCs means that you get a lot of mileage out of your hardware.

 

[satriales]

I bought an Xbox 360 not long after it first came out, but after a year I sold it and got a PS3 instead. My reasons for not keeping the 360 were that the exclusives just didn't interest me in the same way the PS3 exclusives did.

I enjoyed Test Drive and Dead Rising, but I had zero interest in Gears of War or Halo. Looking forward it was fairly obvious that games like Dead Rising and Test Drive were only exclusive because the PS3 hadn't been released at the time and that sequels to those games would likely be multi platform, so I guess the simple answer is that the 360 exclusives didn't appeal to me.

There was no way I was going to miss out on Metal Gear Solid 4 or Gran Turismo 5 so a PS3 was a definite purchase but after having a 360 for a year I didn't feel like I needed or had enough time for both consoles, the PS3 had more than enough games to fill my spare time. I also didn't like paying to play online as I only play online very occasionally.

 

[hoho]

I live together with my GF and we did buy XB for ourselves, though I've played for about 30h in total over past two years with it.

Main reason is that I like FPS games but playing them with a controller is just horrible. I always feel I can't use my maximum potential just because of the limitations of the controller. It's simply not right when you need to move to aim better instead of moving the cross hair because of the terrible accuracy the analog sticks have. Mouse+KB is light years ahead of that. I even bought some adapter for it to use mouse+KB (xfps I think) but games are written with the limitations of analog sticks in mind and thus have similar dead zones even when using mouse so it wasn't much better.

E.g I completed HL2 on PC at maximum difficulty level without too much problems. When I played it on XB at medium I died a LOT simply because of having to fight with controller instead of mobs. It's just so inefficient.


Second genere of games I like is RTS'es and these too are relatively bad simply because of controllers. I did try Halo wars but it didn't seem much better.



We don't own PS3 and I don't think we'll be getting one any time soon and I'm sure similar controller problems will still be there. We also have Wii but it has been somewhere in a very dusty place for months as there doesn't seem to be any good games worth playing for more than a few days.

I guess consoles simply are not for me, at least for "serious" gaming. They are somewhat good for fast and simple entertainment through some arcade game but that's pretty much it.

 

[vazel]

Well since people that own a 360 are posting in this thread even though it wasn't meant for their input(gotta love the attention whorish internet) I figure I'll post why I own one but am not thrilled for it. I got one as a b-day gift and the thing that irritates me the most about it are that all the good exclusive games come out on PC, having to pay for online, and hardware reliability(it's failed on me once so far). And the noise my 360 manufactured in 2007 makes is loud, it sounds like how your average PC from around 10 years ago used to sound.

Watching Netflix on the 360 is awesome but having to pay for Gold on top of Netflix is not. I'm currently on the $1 for one month of Gold deal and when that expires I'm not renewing.

 

[Neb]

Yeah, games ported from console to PCs means that you get a lot of mileage out of your hardware.

Mostly and even bad ones run much better in regards to visuals vs perfomance. Such titles like Fallout 3, FC2, SF, AC, Gears, LP etc despite their nature allows for some serious increase in detail and framerate giving good return on HW investment. And mods gives better investment satisfaction. Though even if identical at base, high AA and AF makes 2 worlds of difference and 60fps aint for the bad either!

But why no xbox360?

Well for me most games interesting are already on PC or scheduled to come to PC. Build quality seems rather low regaarding consoles and I really have no interest in long exchange/repair times. I've grown acustomed to the visuals on PC so it kinda hard to take a backstep if only for such a thing as lack of AF. Also mouse and keyboard is so much better bar for racing/fight games.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Don't own because anything I would want to do can be done on PC, and most pubs foolishly ignore local multiplayer (IMO the #1 reason to own a console at all--Timesplitters FTW ). I'm not paying for online multiplayer. If I were to get interested enough and want to pay for home internet, I'd get a new PC before I ever bought a 360.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

If you have a gaming rig that doubles as an HTPC there is no reason to buy a 360, unless you can't wait for the exclusives to hit the PC.

I still can't get over the overwhelming amount of people that responding to my 'don't buy a 360 ever' thread that seemed to take it as understood you would need more than one of them.

I think the talk about larger HDD and necessary wifi is rubbish fanboyisms trying to inflate the price of the 360 to that of the PS3.

But when you factor in the notion that you need to have a SPARE CONSOLE on hand, the 360 price instantly doubles.

And that's even if you can get MS to take your console back, which is nearly impossible to do since they stopped shipping out the return packaging. Their support web page is constantly down, and doesn't work the way it should.

I finally got my Elite dropped off to UPS today (three weeks after the RRoD), because their website was down and both their email tech support and phone tech support were completely unhelpful, kept requesting the same information again, and kept offering solutions when they were already told those were tried and had failed.

It finally took other Xbox.com forum users to write down the url of the DIRECT webpage (obviously long and convoluted), and realize how to alter it so that I could get to the page to actually print out my label.

Let me say that again: MS's Xbox phone tech support was absolutely no help. MS's Xbox email tech support was absolutely no help. Whoever they have monitoring their 'moderated for tech support' forum was no help.

Other people who encountered the same problem had to come to my aide to offer a workaround solution.

Anybody who buys a 360 is foolish. If you want to turn this into a 'Why don't you buy a PS3?' thread, I'll give that answer: Price and exclusives don't interest me. I'd rather just build a gaming rig that doubles as an htpc and be done with it.

 

[-tkf-]

The 360 has nothing to offer ME that i can´t get from my PS3 and in most cases the experience is just better as well, simple ehh

That being said, when the 360´s on the market has proven they don´t break down i will get one because i collect consoles.

 

[Graham]

...

While I understand your frustration I think you are unfairly exaggerating.
It's not a fun thing to have happen, but honestly I'm starting to feel you are dragging it out for all it's worth and it's getting tiresome.

Yes, the original 360 design (pre-falcon) had serious flaws that caused a lot of people's console (mine included) to have problems.

To claim if you are buying a 360 you *need* to buy two is ludicrous, especially given the actual replies in the original thread.
Having no system for a week was an inconvenience at worst. I had to use MC on my laptop for a week, I got on with my life. I can understand 3 weeks would start getting frustrating.

...

No consoles (or PCs for that matter) are flawless, to expect so I think is naive (and ultimately magnifies any frustrations).
Pre-falcon 360s are flawed, no question. While I don't feel this can be said of current models moreso than other consoles, at least you have a hell of a lot better warranty if something does go wrong.

...

I didn't like writing this post at all. But I felt it had to be said.
[edit] For the record, I don't want to turn this thread into a 'rrod stories' thread. My intention was using my case for context and I've since removed it.

 

[hoho]

My personal experience, like many others, was very simple.
When the machine first froze and displayed the red ring: I went to the xbox.com support site, filled out a web form, it gave me a delivery address. I packaged it up and sent it off free of charge.
It came back 6 days later and has been running perfectly since.

As MS has no support in Estonia it was a "bit" more difficult. We gave the box to the store that sold us it, we got no answer in 4 weeks. After that we just demanded our money back and we got it. For that money we bought a new XB that seems to work, for now even though it's loud as hell.

 

[suryad]

I don't own an xbox360 because:
- there's really no exclusive games that I feel I'd must have.
- Online gaming isn't that important to me, that's why I don't like paying extra for a service I'd rarely use.
- reliability issues
- no blu-ray (although nowadays when standalones are cheap enough, that's not such a big issue)

Ditto. I never cared too much for the system. Now if PS3 gets more itnernal memory as MS has been doing lately with the Xbox and freaking mkv playback I think it will be perfect.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

No real worthwhile exclusive. Poor genre diversity. Poor hardware. Expensive. Too many over hyped games that are shallow as hell; and I already own a PC and a DS. There nothing the 360 can do my PC can't. When I upgraded my PC, I had no choice. My original PC was dying, and all I needed to spend was an extra 100 dollars to get games running better than the 360 as oppose to spending over 300 bucks to play the same games.

 

[RancidLunchmeat]

You're right, it's not an issue. It's my imagination.

http://forums.xbox.com/27796504/ShowPost.aspx

 

[AzBat]

You're right, it's not an issue. It's my imagination.

http://forums.xbox.com/27796504/ShowPost.aspx

I miss the Rancid that was having fun playing Halo3 & 1vs100 on the 360. This new Rancid? Not so much. Give me a ring when the old Rancid is back. Thanks!

Tommy McClain

 

[-tkf-]

I miss the Rancid that was having fun playing Halo3 & 1vs100 on the 360. This new Rancid? Not so much. Give me a ring when the old Rancid is back. Thanks!

Tommy McClain

Call Beyond3D support and ask for Box

 

[Acert93]

Main reason is that I like FPS games but playing them with a controller is just horrible.

www.xim360.com Works great. Ask Robert