I have been enjoying myself immensely. The console itself? Still big, but sexy. Mine sits vertically by my TV. Turning on (and turning off) the console with the controller is a very nice feature. For example, if I'm playing a game late and I'm laying in bed I can just shut it off from bed and go right to sleep or watching TV. The next morning, I can just grab the controller and turn it on from my bed without getting up. The original Xbox took forever to rip CDs, about 25 minutes or so. The 360 though, rips a CD in about 5 minutes. The new Dashboard is very easy to use and a lot better than the original Xbox. You hit the Xbox Guide button on the controller and part of it'll slide over, from there you can check your gamercard, friends list, messages, pick your custom soundtracks, etc. Hit Y and it'll take you to the full Dashboard where you can access your harddrive's memory, the Xbox Live Marketplace, etc. The only thing I don't like about the console is how loud the disc is read. If you play in a quiet room, it'll annoy the hell out of you. I play with my surround sound turned up pretty loud though, so unless I'm playing late and night (where I can have the surround sound on), I don't notice it. The power supply? Also big, but it's behind my TV so I don't notice it.
Games. I've played Project Gotham Racing 3 the most. Probably around 15 hours or so. I just finished the Solo Career today, and have around 11 out of 26 achievements completed in the game. Oh yeah, achievements, they're awesome. You do something in the game and you earn points for doing it on your gamercard under Gamerscore. It seems like something that'll keep me playing the games, trying to get all the achievements. Kameo so far is a lot of fun, but I can tell it's going to be really short. As you play it it's just like "Achievement unlocked! Achievement unlocked! Achievement unlocked!" So yeah, that's how I can tell... Also from all the reviews so far. Graphics are beautiful in some areas, alright in others. Sound is amazing, I'm loving the orchestrated music in this game. Perfect Dark Zero. The "big" game. So far I'm not sure on it. I've only played about 5 hours of it (most of that being multiplayer) and there are things I like and things I don't. You can move around a lot for a first person shooter, and there's absolutely no auto-aim in the game (nearly all console shooters have some)... this makes it take longer than usual to kill someone. The graphics are amazing in some places and just alright in others. I wouldn't say they're ugly anywhere, though. Multiplayer has a steady framerate... until you play Splitscreen. It'll drop every now and then and it TRIES to hide it with a motion blur effect. It's not too annoying, but Rare should've been able to keep the framerate over 30 throughout the entire game. Lazy programming. I played some co-op campaign last night... It was fun until we got to a boss. The game didn't really tell you what to do there and it just stopped being fun. The level design in multiplayer isn't too great, a lot of the time it'll tell you "Go to _______!" and you have no clue where to go so you have to stand around for a couple minutes until arrows show up on the ground and direct you where to go.
I keep hearing there a lot of 360 problems, but so far I've experience none. My friend's 360 though... it scratched their PDZ disc. It scratches any disc you put in it, they took it to GameStop (the console and the game) and GameStop couldn't replace either. They were out of both.
Anyways, I'm gonna go back to playing. Downloading some demos right now.
