yes

never noticed any lag

Ditto, never noticed any lag whilst playing LIVE.

Had the 360 since the day it came out and i highly recommend it to anyone.

It will be a good moment to buy one once Premiums with HDMI reach Europe.


Pros imho:

- Catalogue is the best of the three right now. It doesn't have many awesome games, but it has a bunch of OK to good games and a bunch of potentially good games coming.

- XBLA rocks. Just get Bomberman and Puzzle Fighter and forget about retail games :P

- The pad is good, except for the dpad. This was one of the reasons why I bought the 360 before the PS3.

- Live is nice to play with friends and voice chat is integrated pretty nicely.

- The bazar rocks for downloading demos and extras for the games you play.

Cons:

- DRM bullshit, you can't even store videos or music on the hard drive. And it doesn't support NTFS formatted hard drives.

- It is so big and sooooooo noisy. I now have one with the BenQ drive, that's suposed to be the quietest of the three, and it's kinda annoying. The Hitachi one made more noise though.

- Accessories are overpriced. 80 euros for a Wi-Fi adapter, 65 for a controller with the play & charge kit, etc.

- You have to pay 60 euros a year for the Live service, which is nothing special, but I gotta admit it runs well (lag in game is a matter of the peers though).

- The customer service is horrible. It's the worst customer service ever, don't expect them to be competent. Also, they have people that speak various languages. Pray so the one that answers you knows your language, I've even had to spell what they have to put on the report.

Not going to explain it all, but in my last letter to a Microsoft executive I needed four pages to explain all the trouble I've had with their customer service.

- Don't expect keyboard and mouse support. Not a big deal for me as I play FPS on the PC, but it would be nice to have the option to use them.


If it wasn't for the customer service I would be pretty happy with it.

About the 20GB hard drive, how long did that last you and how big are the arcade games usally, If I do get the 360 I'll be getting a few aracde games stright away.

arcade games are only around 50mb. of course then u have extra content u can get for various games but u can redownload it at any time.
demos are generally 500mb-1gig so can fit plenty on before needing to delete the older ones.

The current size cap on arcade games is 250 MB, but most of them are at about 50 MB. Demos range from 500 MB to 2 GB (Bioshock).

I have the Elite one now, with the 120 GB HD, and I'm using about 25 GB, but that's because my brother came last week and downloaded tons of demos and all the extra content for GoW and GRAW2.

If I were using only the arcade games and the mappacks I wouldn't need more than 2 GB, so I think 20 GB is enough (even though you will have to remove old demos from time to time).

so when will the HDMI-premiums reach the stores in europe?

I suppose soon, maybe by the next month or something. The Halo edition 360s are nothing more than Premiums with HDMI and their release date is late September.

ive had mine for a couple of months, love it!

live is cool, if u dont play games on it, you've always got the free demos and arcade games to download!

i toyed with the idea...

i might get one at some point but right now a new pc is in the works as i spend most of my time on mine

after i buy a decent tv i may consider one :D

has some ace games on it but the coming pc games look really good. I'd rather have a mouse and keyboard to play tho to play the likes of cod 4

its Xbox360 vs PS3

360 has more games and a good internet service but which you have to pay for, though its not expensive. The ps3 has free internet, does blu ray if you want that which personally i wouldnt and has less games to purchase. I own a 360 but have it chipped so I cant play online anyway, but to be honest I barely use mine now and after my pc upgrade thats the only thing i use.

Put in perspective a console is only really good when youve got friends around at your house or you just want to play singleplayer, consoles are also good when ur low on cash and have a dated PC so even tho u have no chance to play new pc games at good frames your console always will.

When put in rank the PC outweighs the consoles for online gaming 100 fold. If you are desperate to play your friends on xbox live play them, 360s can be bought now for very cheap prices.

PS3 is a expensive gaming console but a cheap blu ray player
Xbox360 would be the best buy if you just wanna play games.

I would still pick the xbox360 cheap and a lot of games.

best gift I have ever received!

GAME are doing an amazing deal starting tomorrow:

360 premium
2 official wireless controllers
Forza motorsport 2
Medal of honour airbourne

Ł280 so around €320

HDMI is not needed on the 360 if you only want to play games, the component connection is perfectly fine and only people who really don't have much of a clue will tell you that you need HDMI for high def resolutions.

The only reason to hold out and wait to buy a 360 would be for the new falcon chipset. The only problem is no-one knows when they are switching to it so you could be waiting a year.

I needed HDMI. I have my TV's component inputs busy with a Wii and a DVD player. Having the option is always good and HDMI is worth waiting one or two months.

Also, it's future proof.

I'd prefer to have my dvd player through HDMI for the upscaling.

Don't you find your Wii looks worse using component over the normal composite cables as well?

Unfortunately my DVD doesn't have HDMI output :/

I gotta try 360's upscaling for DVDs, some people say it's pretty good.

My Wii looks way better on component, but I've seen what you say on some TV sets. It's like the more diffuse image of the composite cables looks better than a crispier image upscaled on those sets or something like that.

up scaling is pretty much a farce, can't create pixels out of nothing

Well, if you ever thought upscaling is the same as raising the output resolution then yes, it's a farce.

If by upscaling you mean resizing the image and adding some filters to make it look better, then it's not.

I know what you mean :)

I just get annoyed with people expecting up scaling to convert 480 into 780/1080 and so on =]

Not.

just buy one, if you don't like it send it back

going from playing PC games to games on live is a HUGE difference, live is much more laggy and sometimes (for me) matches are unplayable.

Yea I know it's going to be a big difference, but I'm bored and there's nothing that I'm intrested in playing coming out for awhile on PC.

Well it depends what you're going to play. If you're gonna be playing an fps over live I think that most PC FPS players would hate it. The first time I played live I was ready to throw my controller at the TV because it was just so freakin rediculous.

Xbox's are pretty expensive still (I don't think the price drop applied to Europe) and unless there are some single player games you'd like to play on it too I really don't think it's worth it just for live play.

That said, if you do want to buy one I think the premium would be fine. I got the core system since it was cheaper but then I ended up needing to buy all this extra shit for it which would have ended up costing the same as if I had bought the premium one.

The Elite version (with HDMI output) is not worth it unless you plan on using your Xbox to watch movies.

To conclude; Live sucks, if you wanna play with your mates then invite them over, don't play over live. There are some fun games out for xbox but to justify it's purchase just to play games over live is not something i'd recommend - you will only get frustrated at how bad it sucks to play over live :(

you joking? theres a shockwave of massive titles arriving on the pc, or have u got ur eye on halo 3

I said there are none coming out in the next while that I am intrested in.

get a wii

My roommate's XB360 broke two days ago started giving us the Red Ring of Death. We were able to fix it short period of time using the towel trick, but it's a finicky machine. Tech support was very annoying for him. And I believe this is a very common flaw for 360's.

the majority have a perfectly fine console

Get back to me if yours ever breaks.

Google search, shows millions of results for it:

Results 1 - 10 of about 2,610,000 for Red Ring of Death.

But that's out of a ton of other XB360 results without the RRoD.

Results 1 - 10 of about 162,000,000 for "Xbox 360" -Red -Ring -Death -Overheat .

i bought the 1st model when it was released and mine works fine

Results 1 - 10 of about 162,000,000 for "Xbox 360" -Red -Ring -Death -Overheat .

yes because someone is going to make a post about a perfectly normal working xbox

actually 1/3 of XBOX360 brake.

That still means the majority work just fine though =\

one out of three is bad...

buy a modified 360.. all games for free =)

yet no playing on live, and if you do you will get caught and the only way you'll get back on is buying a new one.

or replacing the original regkey files to your cd/dvd rom on the 360 and making it legit again, u dont have to buy a new console at all

er I don't think that works at all.

what if it bricks

I send it back to be repaired.

best console out of the 3 ...