confessions of a serial hobbyist

So I finally broke down and got an Xbox 360…

As someone who’s worked in games for as long as I have, this is terribly late in the game to get one, but c’est la vie. I finally picked it up for Rock Band, mostly so friends and I could play online together. Note that as of yet I’m like $600 in the hole between the 360 and Rock Back and we haven’t played a single game online yet…but still, the justification stands. And really Rock Band is the only game I’ve bought for the 360, any other games showing up as played by me are games I’ve borrowed from friends.

And speaking of, I did shove my gamer card on the side-bar there…mostly for me to keep track of (really, who comes to this site but spam bots and google bots). I have to say the community aspects like this that Microsoft rolled out for Xbox Live are amazing. It’s simple ideas like Achievements and Gamer Points that take players and make them WANT to play more different games on their system in order to get more of these imaginary useless numbers. And more games sold is more money in Microsoft’s pocket – good for them.

Lastly, it’s a bit odd because I’ve had a hi-def TV for some months now, but this is the first real hi-def signal going in there (sure I have a DVD player that upconverts to 1080i, but that doesn’t count, it’s a standard def signal being upressed, very different). Some things look amazingly better, some things I can’t really tell. However the lack of jaggies and pixelated images (yes Wii, I’m looking at you) is refreshing.