For those of you lucky enough (depending on how you look at it) to score a 360, I'm wondering if it has met all your expectations? Yes, I know the games are limited now, but I'm wondering how big an improvement there has been over the 1st generation xbox? For those of you who camped out, or stayed online waiting for FS or BestBuy to post, would you do it all over again?
I guess I have been caught up in the hype and have been trying to get one, but the longer I go with no success, I'm leaning towards holding off until the PS3 comes out. At least then we'll have a decent comparison.

Waiting in line.

- i waited from 6am to 7:30am at the local FS. I was 10th in line. They had 30 boxes.
- knowing what I know now, I would have slept an extra hr, and gone at 7:15am. (They handed out tickets at this FS at 7:30).
- think of what you are going to wear for warmth in line. I had a coffee in a vacuum mug, and ski clothing on. I could have used an extra sweater by 7:30am... was starting to feel a little chilled.
- lines will be shorter now, as supply seems to be increasing.

machine itself. - premium
- I've had it for 24hrs, played maybe 2-3 hrs with it.
- made some funny noises when i moved it... sounded like fan blades were hitting something. :(
- orange ring of light - lost DD5.1 sound. DD5.1 comes through a Toslink cable. The connection wasn't set in right, seems you need to really jam it in there.
- playing with cables seems to have solved it. DD5.1 back, and ring of light gone.
- wireless controller is cool, you can turn on/off the console w the controller.
- dvd playback seems brighter than the old xbox. again, not sure if it can be changed in settings or not.

- game look very good. played 2-3 hrs of Call of Duty 2, and graphics are pretty good.
- Call of Duty 2, - no lobby in online play, which is very disappointing. you have to re-invite your friends after each match.
- chat feature is cool in xbox live., can chat to any friend, in any game - no longer has to be the same game.
- have pgr3, but haven't openned it yet. still working on forza for xbox, plus have steering wheel for xbox, but none for 360

HTH,
P

Happy with it??????? I am Happy! but I havn't been able to open it yet! my wife bought it for me and it is under the tree :( I come home from work and just stare at the wraped box. I went out and got call of duty and PDZ and an extra controller. so until christmas day I guess I can pretend. so to answer your question, I am very happy with the way the games play in my imagination :D

If you have an hdtv monitor, xbox360 is stunning, you will not regret your investment

Call of duty is definitely the game franchise at this point

nba live 06 have stunning graphic

kameo is really really nice

And fight night 3 will be release soon and the expectation are very high (critic said graphic are 2x powerful than madden 06

i didn't wait in line but pre ordered from FS. I have PDZ and PGR3..

over alll i'm really happy with the system, HD looks great, sounds great.. Really like the ipod compatillity and i acutallly use it, wireless controllers are awesome and beat the dongle setup that wass required for wireless controllers on the xbox1... Xbox live is a lot of fun and add a ton of replay ability to games like pdz, i also like the ability to download HD demos of some games as well, xbox arcade too is a ton o fun and the free demos keep me happy or the most part.. I'd buy it again but defiently wish more games were out...

mine is under the tree as well. I have COD2, Quake, NHL 2K6, and PDZ all ready to go.

Preordered mine from Futureshop and have been gaming since the day after release. No problems, no glitches.

If you have a HD display and 5.1 surround, it is simply amazing. Coming from the old XBOX, it is definitely a step up. The whole family including my 5/7 year olds play it regularly. My wife especially is addicted to Zuma on XBOX live Arcade - guys this is better than getting the wives chocolate.

I have been playing Kong and have played a little PGR3 and Kameo. I rencently got MS Media connect working and can now stream my 10G iTunes library to the XBOX and also my Photo library at the same time - really great when guests come over for the holidays.

Only comment is that the XBOX 360 is not a very good DVD player as it does not upconvert while my HTPC which does is still a much better picture. However for my kids, they don't care and they can simply put a dvd in and press play.

Anyway. Pretty happy here - just waiting for more titles.

XBOX Live Tag - O2QUIK

I preordered mine and had it since launch day, overall I've been impressed for the most part.Today my disc drive crapped out on me and I cant play games on disc just over live marketplace :( I was alot happier yesterday

I got mine on redflagdeals.com - Delievered on Wed the day after release.

I am fairly happy with mine.
I have 5 games with my fav being NBA 2K6.

The 360 is played on a sharp aquos 32".

Am I happy - Yes ; Will I stop gaming on the PC - No Way.

The graphics are not as good as I thought they might be. Madden 2006 absolutely sucks. Perfect Dark Zero is boring.

I'm just waiting for a few games (Godfather, Fight night III, ......) before final judgement.

Mine is still under the X-Mass tree so I haven't gotten to play it as of yet. But I think that we have to reserve judgement on this console. We have in no way seen what this thing is capable of with these launch games. It will take a few years before developers have the knowledge to squeeze the best performance out of this box. Just look at X-BOX developers have been workin on games for that unit for 5 years and the graphics have been getting better all the time.

Not one of the Launch title is using a 3 cores of the processor. This thing and the PS3 will have alot of horsepower and I think when developers can utilize it to it's full extent it will live up to the hype of the HD era for video games.

Had mine since launch (preorder, no lines) and I am very happy. I have a HDTV and 5.1 surround and the games look and sound amazing. I had my old XBOX hooked up to the same setup and there is a definate improvement. So far I have played PDZ, Amped 3 and King Kong, plus a ton of Live Arcade games. I have my Windows XP computer setup to stream music and pictures and I have ripped a few CDs to the hard drive. No real problems to report, it would be nice to be able to rip MP3 CDs or download tunes from my computer, but the streaming works pretty good anyways. I've even got me sister, who never plays videogames to play a few Live arcade titles, they are a nice addition. Also, making a slideshow with music in your living room is a nice touch. Only downside is that all these little additions eat up valuable gaming time...

Not one of the Launch title is using a 3 cores of the processor.
I saw an interview with some guy from Call of Duty 2, and he specifically said they were using the 3 cores, and that this was the reason why it has better framerates and smoother play than even most top end PC's could do today. He went on to say that as dual core and maybe multi-core processors start to show up on PCs in numbers then that will change back again.

Still seems strange to me that all software isn't multi-processor/multi-threaded, that's all I've been coding for the last 12 years or so on my product, and I bet a lot of the tasks will lend themselves to it from number crunching to splitting up the AI and physics etc. once the developers find out how to utilize it. That said, the PS3 I think only has one true processor, the rest are very specialized and can only perform certain tasks I think, mostly to do with speeding up graphics computations, no? If so that wil mean a fairly different programming model for games designed to run on both systems so it may be interesting to see how that plays out.

http://img455.imageshack.us/img455/9460/72600039vq.th.jpg (http://img455.imageshack.us/my.php?image=72600039vq.jpg)geometry wars uses all 3 cores also--- "Only a few types of object affect the grid. As the grid system is rather expensive to calculate, it actually runs on the second core along with the audio system, (the first core being dedicated to gameplay and particles, the third is used to render the audio)." source (http://www.bizarreonline.net/page.php?p=cakeyinterview&f=gwre)

I'm happy with the 360, it was the first console I've bought since the Intellivision back in the 80s. I've been a PC gamer for most of my life but I can see (as a developer) that less and less developers are supporting PCs these days so I figured it was time to get on the console bandwagon.

The console is great, smaller than I expected, luckily it fits perfectly in my Sony center channel stand (SURG1SS stand for the RP 42" KDFEA10 model). This way it's not near anything else, has adequate ventilation and doesn't look out of place. The console is pretty loud however and I can see a lot of HT enthusiasts being put-off because of it. The sound doesn't bother me but then I have a pretty large room (24' high ceilings) and lots of speakers so the fan noise is drowned out for me.

The controllers are nice, seem comfortable (even for a PC gamer who is used to mouse/keyboard) and last a LONG time on a charge. The ability to use the mic and headphone over live wirelessly is great but the sound quality on live right now isn't great. It's usable but could be improved.

The dashboard on the system is very nice, marketplace is excellent, being able to download new movie trailers in 720p for free is really great.

The media integration is what really sold the system for me. My PC is no where near my TV but my house is wired for Cat5 so once all the media software was set up I was able to stream my endless gobs of MP3s and digital photos from my PC clear across the house. I also bought a TV tuner and Media Center 2005 which has been very cool (I managed to record the season finale of Survivor to score points with the wife in regards to pissing away so much money on the 360) :D

My biggest complaints of the system:
- media streaming is too picky, WMV, MPG only. I understand why they left divx out but that doesn't make me feel any better about it
- media center extender could have been so much more, especially from the 360 standpoint and having so much wasted power (would be nice to use full remote desktop, browse web pages, etc)
- occasional software (game) lockups, not really microsoft's problem though I think the rush to release put too much pressure
- no auto-run disable option, I hate the system always loads the game in the DVD drive automatically when turned on
- some of the dashboard seem out of place or unfinished, the system works great but seems like some options have 400 locations to change them and some are buried in some obscure place (themes etc)
- no upconverting, with all that horsepower you would have thought they would have included options for upconverting (on/off, different upconverting mechanisms/algorithms, etc)
- seeking through media when streaming from the desktop seems unfinished, sort of a pain to fast-forward a song, etc.

Great comments from everybody so far.

My thoughts:

Pros:
- Setting up Media Connect was pretty easy, I can see this going very far for Microsoft
- Maybe it's just me, but digital photos viewed on my LCD TV are EXCELLENT quality, I can really pick out fine detail and the slideshow feature works great; this really beats the pants off plugging in my digital camera via the composite port
- Ability to stream music is great, becuase it avoids the crap digital-to-audio conversion on my laptop and outputs direct to my surround sound system
- COD2 rocks. Nuff said.
- Very impressive analogue surround output. I haven't gotten round to buying an optical audio cable yet, but just using the standard RCA cables results in stellar Dolby PLII output through my receiver and surround system. COD2 5.1 sound is frankly mindblowing.
- When I turn off the 360 using my Harmony remote, the controller also turns itself off. How cool is that??

Cons:
- I also hate the auto-run feature, but at least pushing the guide button gets you to the dashboard relatively quickly
- Playing my music collection through the 360 means using the crappy playlists feature on the 360. No ability to save playlists? Come on.
- When downloading stuff from Live marketplace, you can't do anything else with the 360...which really sucks for a 500MB demo

Overall, a big thumbs up from me! A good start by microsoft.

Love it!!! I've been playing Hearts in teh Live Arcade more than anything lately it seems... Good times...

Bucket

My 360 was giving me unrecognized (region) disc errors this sunday( after a month of no problems with only a couple of freezes on KING KONG) it then started to flash red in the bottom right corner ,then all but the top right flashing(errors 71 74 79).I called 1-800-4MYXBOX and they said they would overnight me a box to ship for repair.Two days pass by so I call again because I had found another 360 at zellers( had 3 just sitting there)I wanted to tell them I wouldnt be needing the box.They hadnt even sent the box yet:mad: after 2 days, so much for customer support.-------p.s. 2 year extended warrenty is $60 american from MS support. http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/8093/picture2155ie.th.jpg (http://img353.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture2155ie.jpg)http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/65/picture2186uu.th.jpg (http://img353.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture2186uu.jpg)

2 year extended warrenty is $60 american from MS support. http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/8093/picture2155ie.th.jpg (http://img353.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture2155ie.jpg)http://img353.imageshack.us/img353/65/picture2186uu.th.jpg (http://img353.imageshack.us/my.php?image=picture2186uu.jpg)

I almost got the extended support last night, but when I asked him if I had to pay for shipping myself, he said Yes. What the hell is that?

Since I just bought the system last week at Best Buy, i'm still eligible to purchase the extended warranty from them. Anyone know how much it costs? If its the same price as MS, then it has to be worth it since I don't have to pay for shipping myself.

System rocks by the way. KOTOR looks great. Loading times improved alot, image just looks sharper. Kameo has amazing graphics. I find myself admiring every level. Next game ==> Oblivion, Gears Of War and Ghost Recon.

I rencently got MS Media connect working and can now stream my 10G iTunes library to the XBOX and also my Photo library at the same time - really great when guests come over for the holidays.


Did you have much difficulty with this? Took me forever to get this working, and then only with MS Support calling me back and getting me to open a bunch of ports on the LAN (DLink 624) - I'm playing it now but I'm not 100% confident of it staying working. I hadn't tried getting photos and music simultaneously - just happy to get it working somehow. I also need some way to get playlists put together for this as my iTunes stuff doesn't seem to appky here. Next up will be plugging in the iPod itself just for kicks, or maybe a USB drive with some pics on it.

Did you have much difficulty with this? Took me forever to get this working, and then only with MS Support calling me back and getting me to open a bunch of ports on the LAN (DLink 624) - I'm playing it now but I'm not 100% confident of it staying working. I hadn't tried getting photos and music simultaneously - just happy to get it working somehow. I also need some way to get playlists put together for this as my iTunes stuff doesn't seem to appky here. Next up will be plugging in the iPod itself just for kicks, or maybe a USB drive with some pics on it.

hey,

Here is part of a post I made in another another forum concerning itunes playlists and what I did to get teh benefits of them over mediaConnect to the 360:

"I use iTunes exclusively to handle my music collection.

I have my 360 linked to my XP pc so I can get access to these tunes. The problem is you can't create Xbox custom playlists that include music streaming from the PC.

I'd rather not have to go through burning a mixed CD and ripping the music to the Xbox HD if I have the ability to stream from my PC.

The xbox can read Winamp playlists! Bonus...

I have about 5-7 iTunes playlists I use on a regular basis to weed out the tunes in my collection I really want to hear.

What I've done is exported the main itunes playlists I use to a text file. You can then convert these text files to Winamp Playlists using this utility:

http://chimpen.com/things/archives/001450.php

Now when you boot up your xbox and want to get some music playing you can point to the winamp playlist on your PC, provided you drop it in a directory that is shared for the xbox to see.

This rocks! The only downside is the winamp playlists are static and would have to be re-generated as you add music to your collection..."