In September I went up town and pre-ordered my XBOX 360. I've been waiting for it ever since. This morning, I got it. I had to wait for an hour in the rain, becuase the store didn't actually open at 8:00 am (despite telling me that it did and inducing me to haul myself out of bed at a very ungodly hour). But at least they had the machine for me, and everything that I had asked for, including the VGA lead that I needed for the lunchtime XBOX event.
I wasn't sure how many people would turn up, I contacted all the students and staff, set the machine up and waited. I was using our rather spiffy HIVE virtual environment, which has a really nice big screen and a superb sound system. I ran the XBOX 360 at 1024x768 and it looked vey spiffy. Around 35 students turned up to take a look (which is quite impressive considering that exams start on Monday).
We had a go at all of the games that I'd brought. First up was Project Gotham Racing. The verdict was that single player driving was amazing. London looked like, well, London. And the view from the car, and the way that it changes as the car speeds up and slows down, and the windscreen gets dirty, was well clever. With two players a lot of the graphical sheen was lost, but it was still very good racing.
Then we moved on to Perfect Dark, the first person shooter. After a very impressive intro the game itself was a bit of a let down. This is probably because we only played it on the little introduction levels. I'll have a better idea of its merit after this weekend and a bit more play.
Finally we came to Condemned. I was not expecting much of this title, I got it as part of the bundle that I bought. However, it was amazing. I didn't think that the XBOX 360 was really going to move gaming in a new direction, a lot of the titles look more of the same kind of thing, better race tracks, more detailed players etc etc. But Condemned was like taking part in a movie with 35 of your friends. Everyone in the room jumped when the drug crazed baddies leapt out. And when I fired the gun people just about fell off their chairs (although we did have the XBOX 360 hooked up to the big surround system - so it did go with quite a bang). It really was like exploring a well creepy place, with amazing lighting and sound. But I'm not going to play it again alone... I can imagine inviting people round to take part in a game like this, in the same way that they might come round to watch a scary movie. This is a new form of entertainment, and the XBOX 360 hosted it very well. We went through a whole bunch of complex and badly lit rooms packed with detailed furniture. If I had been playing Half Life 2 I would have seen around five loading screens. As it was the action never really let up for an instant and everyone there reckoned this was the best of the bunch.
After an hour and a half, people had to go back to work and revison and stuff, and so I put the machine back into its box for the journey home. It was warm, but no warmer than my laptop gets. Ditto the power supply, which is not as large as I was expecting. The whole exercise was a roaring success and everyone who came had a good time. I'm looking forward to getting back from work and spending an evening getting to know the new machine.