Quick first impressions xbox 360

Setting up the system was quite a hassle since i wanted it to look nice in the living room. It meant moving parts of the DSL equipement to the basement and setting up the modem and router in the living room. Getting a good wireless reception on the 2nd floor was also a bit of a problem, but that's not the fault of the 360, but more of the netgear router and nic.

The bad stuff first :

- The 360 white really looks bad on my stack of standard black/silver audio equipement. Also the width of the 360 is non standard. To sum it up; it's ugly.

- Making my gamer profile, i made the mistake of telling the 360 that i live in germany, which is true but : I am dutch and prefer english or dutch and once i told the 360 i was in germany, all online content turned out to be german !. I had to make another gamer profile just to be able to change that. Once set you cannot reset the country (the locale setting does not work that way)

- The noise the noise ! It really is too much, good that the games make even more noise.

- Microsoft wants too much money for the arcade games. Come on 9,60 euro's for marble madness, no way.

The good stuff :

- The dashboard really is a good interface, and the wireless controller just works !

- The image quality on my panasonic plasma (ntsc resolution) is better than expected, the 720p also works and looks sharper than the 480p.

- Downloading, logging in and everything else internet related is stress free and super easy.

- FPS rate really is fluent, much more so than the pc which tends to vary in fps during most games (like FEAR, HL2 and so on)

The so-so stuff :

- The graphics of the games does not blow me away, i am used to a pc with an Ati x1900xt on a widescreen 1680x1050 monitor, and that really is a bit better.

So far so good, it's a nice ugly white console with a great interface. The graphics do not blow me away, don't get me wrong they are not bad, but it's nothing special compared to a good pc.

All comments welcome, and i'll start adding photo's to my blog soon. My gamer tag is "Tornado Mike" as all the other "Mike" variants were already taken.

Contact me on the 360 if you want to !, I am away today but ready for some serious 360 testing sunday !