New 360 Impressions

So I decided to bite the bullet and pick up one of the newfangled Xboxes everyone's been talking about. It's not that I'm made of money, or that I have such a raging hard-on for kinect that I need to spend 300 dollars just to make sure it none of it precious cables ever have to see the inside of a wall outlet. (I doubt I'll even buy one.) But I've been needing some more hard drive space for awhile now and Microsoft's insanely overpriced hard drives actually made this a decent deal; with a little help from some trade-in credit of coarse. So for the sake of grassroots journalism and nothing else to write about I thought I'd let you in on some of my impressions of the new hardware.

First off it's quiet. Maybe a little too quiet. I can actually hear my blood pressure rising when I'm play Modern Warfare 2. But despite the quiet fan it's nice to know Microsoft made sure this thing gets as hot as ever. You can practically see the heat rising from the vent in the top. I was thinking about getting a hotplate for my room to keep my nachos warm but problem solved. Thanks Microsoft!

Another feature is the new touch sensitive buttons on the front. I like to know what genius decided pressing in on a button was TOO inconvenient. So when I went to plug something into the USB ports I accidentally turned off my Xbox. Fucking brilliant.
On the plus side, I do have to say switching machines was relatively painless. One thing that's not mentioned much is that you can use portable USB hard drives as well as flash drives to transfer your data. While the transfer speed is too slow to actually store games or dlc there long term, it's perfect for moving all you stuff from one 360 hard drive to another without re-downloading a bunch of crap. I will warn you it's limited to 16GBs of storage like the flash drives, and I had to format the thing to get it to work. But it was a spare I had kicking around, and it saved me from buying a 16gb stick or the 20 dollar, never to be used again, 360 transfer cable.

All in all there's not much else to say about the new system that hasn't been discussed to death everywhere else. Built in Wi-fi is good, extra USB ports are good, and it actually doesn't look that ugly when you see it up close. I will say I was surprised when I unpacked it to notice it only came with standard def composite cables. Luckily I still have my VGA cable from my old system, but how fucking cheap do you have to be. You tout this thing as state of the art HD video and gaming machine and then you don't even throw in the right fucking cables to use it. Even the original 360 came with component cables. So if this is your first Xbox prepare to shell out even more money just to play it in HD.

Anyway, I do like the new 360. Was it worth the money? Probably not, but it's not like I was going to spend it on anything useful. (God, I hope 3rd world countries don't have the internet yet.) So if you plan on getting a new Xbox 360 consider yourself warned informed.