We call it an "OOBiE"

    I bought an xbox360 yesterday.  I didn't really mean to buy one, I just happened to be at the company store picking up a copy of Office when I noticed that they were on sale.  We normally don't get a discount on hardware, so this was particularly interesting to me.  The bundle was pretty sweet.  $450 for the premium system and four games (xbox live arcade, kameo, PGR3 and viva pinata special editon) so it came home with me. 

    I must say, I am amazingly impressed so far, particularly with the out of box experience.  Now, to be fair, I had pretty low expectations.  You see, my company has a long standing tradition of having the most horrible initial user experience imaginable.  Usually you plunk in your CD or fire up your executable and are immediately hit with 15,000 different pop up windows explaining in techy terms... something.

   The text is usually something like:

"This program needs to endoscoptomate your jigglypuff and enumerate the funkatronic widget in the hyperquandrant accelerator.  This may cause your gumdrop equivilator to pendulate uncermoniously.  Do you want to continue?"

    Then if you click "Yes" the program proceeds to rape your hard drive and peg your CPU at 100% for the next fifteen minutes while you stare at an hourglass cursor wondering just what the hell is going on and whether or not you should be looking for a young priest and an old priest.

Because 720 just seemed like boasting

    But with the 360 I didn't actually get any of that.  I plugged it in, booted it up, and it came up with a nice clean screen asking me my language preference.  Then it discovered my network, configured itself, and asked if I wanted to go grab my user profile.  Sure, what the hell, I thought.  This should be good for a few laughs.

    All I had to do was enter my hotmail passport Windows Live account information and everything just kinda worked from there. Now, understand that the same process on my original xbox took me... umm... well, months actually because I had a hellacious time getting the networking correct and I got so annoyed that I just stopped dealing with it for a few weeks.

    With my xbox live account all set up and the network funcitoning fine, the system automatically went out into the universe and pulled down the correct time and date.  A few moments later it let my know that one of my friends had sent me a friend request, so I went ahead and accepted that.  I tweaked the UI settings a little bit on my own and then popped in my first game.

    From power on to fully-set up, windows-live-functioning and game-playing goodness was about 10 minutes, my logic flow was smooth, and I never saw a screen that I didn't understand.  Not bad sirs.  Not bad at all.

The aftermath

    After playing a few games of Geometry Wars I called my friend to talk about my new purchase and he let me know that on the xbox 360 you can queue up downloads, and they will download while you are playing other games, without affecting your framerate.  Niiiice.

    So I proceeded to queue up demos for Lego Wars II, Madden '07, Superman Returns, some random movie trailer, NHL2k7 and... umm... I dunno, something else.  These downloads merrily happened in the background while I played PGR3 and, as my friend mentioned, had no adverse affect on my framerate.

    I wound up playing the damn thing for like 4 hours straight.  The Lego Wars game is just too cool.  You basically run around as little lego representations of Luke, Obi Wan, R2D2 and C3P0.  You can build different things out of legos and do crazy things like use Chewbacca to rip the arms off of little lego stormtroopers.  It is crazy fun, for no good reason.  I think the fact that the source material is so familiar is probably a big chunk of that, but whatever. 

    Madden was... ehh.  I mean, it looked very pretty and the gameplay was a'ight.  I could only play Seattle vs. Pittsburgh in the demo.  I played Seattle and as it turns out Pittsburgh loses if they referees get off their knees and stop blowing the game.  Anyway, I guess computer football just isn't my thing because the game didn't hold my interest for long.

    Next up was the new Superman game.  Good fun that.  You can fly around the city and pick up things like cars and dumpsters and fling them at enemies.  You can also be an evil super-asshole by picking up innocent civilians and dropping them in the ocean, or stealing their cars and parking them on top of nearby buildings (Superman never got to go to college and be in a frat, so he was making up for lost time).

    Finally I watched this little 3-minute movie "Cops and Robbers".  It was a commercial for xbox live, but it was fairly entertaining and looked very nice.

    All-in-all I'd have to say that I'm quite satisfied with the purchase.  This might change after I put the Viva Pinata game into the console, but whatever.