--- Xbox 360 impressions ---

Here at GamesWeLike.com, we've managed to get our hands on an Xbox 360 on launch day.  It was surprisingly hard to get one compared to past hardware launches.  These launches are getting bigger every generation, thanks to the mainstream acceptance videogames get these days, along with movies, sports, TV and other established entertainment.

We now have the X360 hooked up, running in High Definition (720p), and have put it to the test with 5 games: Call of Duty 2, GUN, Kameo: Elements of Power, Perfect Dark Zero, and King Kong.

We've also tried it in "normal" TV mode (480i), standard resolution progressive scan (480p).

Here are our impressions:

First, the controller.  We got our hands on this a few days early.  It's a great controller.  The analog sticks are excellent, the button layout is perfect, the shoulder button design is awesome (front shoulder buttons are just buttons, back ones are triggers), and it looks nice, too.  The only bad part is the D-pad, which kind of sucks.

Next up, the console itself.  It looks fine, and is a little on the large side, but not too bad.  The disc tray and hard drive seem to be made of the cheapest, crappiest chrome plastic ever invented, but otherwise it's a decent design.

The power supply...um...well, you may have heard rumors about the power supply.  The rumors are true.  It's gargantuan!  Seriously, it's huge.  It's about the size of my forearm from wrist to elbow.  It has its own power light that puts every other piece of electronics in your rack to shame.  If you have a nightlight, throw it away.  You don't need it anymore.  It also has its own internal fan.

Despite the huge external power supply, the X360 runs HOT!  When you take a disc out, it's pretty cooked.  No more boiling discs to get them to work, I guess...

Next: setup.  After hooking up the machine, the first thing that happened was...nothing.  That's because neither the wireless controller nor the wired USB controller were working.  It took a look at the instruction manual to confirm we were doing it right (we were) and several more tries, as well as unplugging and re-plugging the USB controller before they both worked.

Naturally, Microsoft wanted us set up with Xbox Live immediately.  Okay...we started that process.  The first part of it was an update to the software on the hard drive...and a reboot.

When the Xbox 360 rebooted, controller 2 (the wired one) magically became controller 1, and the wireless one stopped working again.  So we screwed around and fixed that.  For the record, if you want a certain controller to be #1, you pretty much have to use it to turn on the console.

After that, we went through another software update for Xbox Live, and then cancelled so we could play some fucking games already.

But we couldn't resist browsing around the menu first.  After all, we still needed to set it up to run in HD, and see what came pre-loaded on the hard drive.

The HD setup was easy enough, the only weird part is that there's a physical switch on the composite/component cable, and it's set to composite by default.  Parental controls are off by default, so no headache there.  

So then we went looking for the demos and movies on the hard drive.  Turns out, there are no demos.  We read that there would be, but there aren't.  There are some movie clips, but who cares?  We didn't watch them.  There's some music, too--again, who cares?

So on to the GAMES!

The first game we tried was Kameo.  Kameo looks nice, although kind of plasticy, it runs fine, and plays fine.  There's nothing too special in the first half hour or so, then we kicked it out to try something else.

That something was Perfect Dark Zero.  Hmm.  Suddenly Kameo doesn't look as plastic anymore.  We're officially renaming this one Plastic Dark Zero.  Everything's so...shiny.  Here are a few screenshots.  Note: we have no way to capture HD, so these are crappy 480i composite video screenshots, so the game does look better than this.  Click to enlarge the pix.

The other thing we noticed about Perfect Dark is the tearing.  Oh, God, the tearing.  It's possibly the worst we've EVER seen.  Come on, Rare, you never heard of V-sync?

For anyone who doesn't know what tearing is, here are a few screens.  Notice they all have a horiozontal line where it looks like the screen's been cut in half...that's tearing.  And it's everywhere in this game.  Basically, if you turn, it tears.  And we tried the game in 480i, 480p, 720p, and 1080i (which is just scaled up from 720p).  It always tears.  Ugh.

After that first level of Perfect Dark, we were ready try something else.  It's only the first level, so we're not closing the book on the game, but we were seriously underwhelmed.

Next up is GUN.  It's a current-gen game that got a quick facelift, and it looks like it.  Pretty fun game, though, so far.  We played for an hour or so, then moved on...

... to King Kong.

And got a BIG surprise.  King Kong is also a current-gen game that got a quick facelift...or so we thought.  But it looks great!  This is more like it!  

We're sure that King Kong is technically less impressive than Perfect Dark Zero, Kameo, or Call of Duty 2 (which also looks nice, but we've barely played it).  It's probably using fewer polygons, fewer effects, less detailed character models, and so on.  But King Kong looks better than any of them.

It makes a point, I think: art direction is more important than graphical muscle.  Although both together would be nice, of course.  :-)

We took a few shots of King Kong, from the X360 and PS2 versions for comparison.  To be fair, we should mention that the X360 shots are from crappy composite video, but the PS2 shots are from not-so-crappy S-video.  Still, they give a fair idea of the difference.  Below the screens are the videos that they're from in Mpeg form.  The difference is much more dramatic in motion.

One last note, on HD: it didn't impress us as much as we thought.  We switched back and forth several times (and to composite video for captures as well), and though it clearly looks better, it's not at all the big deal here.  The graphical improvements are way more important than the resolution in making these games look good.  During our switching, we think switching from composite to component video is a bigger improvement than going from 480p to 720p.  That was surprising.

So overall, what do we think of the Xbox 360?  We're mildly impressed, but it's probably the least dramatic generation change to date.  It doesn't scream "Next Gen!" like the Dreamcast did vs. the N64/PS1, doesn't touch the introduction of 3D gaming that the Saturn/PS1 brought at the end of the SNES/Genesis days, and it's arguably not as big an improvement as the SNES over the NES, or the NES over the 2600.

But the diminishing returns on graphics my help the X360 out.  A year from now, the PS3 will probably not have as big a graphical advantage as the N64 had over the Playstation, or the Gamecube/Xbox have over the PS2.

Almost everything the X360 brings is welcome, but we'd say the next generation has arrived with more of a whimper than a bang.

If you want to drop us a line, send it to "webmaster" AT "gameswelike.com".