December 2005

As promised, my pal Dodgy Trev, took me back to his gaff for an early lunch of cheese on toast and to play PGR3 on his nice new spanky Xbox 360.

He plays it on some dodgy "no-name, no-brand" 28 inch widescreen TV, so the game was not running at it's HDTV best (or anywhere near it) but I have to say, I was impressed.

Driving games are not really my forte but this game just looks so good! The detail in the cars, buildings and surroundings is so realistic and flows perfectly with no pop-up at all. I get the impression that this is a game where you could easily get lost in the "realism" of it all. As I was racing "downtown" in New York, a portion of the track takes you onto a bridge which just looked real as it whizzed past me! I was really really impressed.

Mum….
I know what I want for christmas….

I also tried to break it by pressing the Xbox button on the wireless controller when the game was loading a new track but it quite happily showed me part of the dashboard where I could see what my (Trev's) mates were up to on XBox Live and I could change my music prefs.
We tried to get the 360 hooked up to some MP3s on his PC using the Media Connect software but this did not seem to work. The PC could see the 360, but not the other way round. Odd. But I have seen some posts over at XBox-Scene where other people have had this issue too.

We then fired up Halo2 which looked crisper and more detailed than ever. The backwards compatibility worked a treat! Come on Halo3, bring it on!

I saw an Xbox360 "in the flesh" this weekend! Yay!

Whilst trying to navigate the immense dimensions of our new local ADSA Walmart store I came across the small Xbox360 demo booth where a spotty faced employee was trying to get rid of an error on screen that said "no signal".

I went and looked at the toys with the kids and returned a little later to find the console working and a man playing FIFA2006 who had ditched his wheelchair bound mother to get at the new hardware. She sat with her back to him, cuddling her lap-blanket looking folornly at the nearby counter of cheap DVD Players, whilst her son pitted his skills of England against Germany.

As predicted, the game looked freakin amazing! The players facial textures and the detail on the clothing rippling in the wind was really cool. As the camera zoomed out to the usual view of the field during play it did not look quite as impressive. But as the bloke guided Paul Scholes to make a poorly judged tackle from behind (not that he would do that in real life…..) the cut scene was really well rendered!

My matey Dodgy Trev has managed to get an Xbox and I am off to play Project Gotham 3 at lunchtime tomorrow - so expect me to give an update after I return - unless I am too busy ringing round trying to find out where I can buy one!