Xbox 360

January 16, 2006
By: C.Whyte

In the past month, I have bought two Xbox 360's. The first one I sold pre Christmas and made a nice little chunk of change, but the second one (post Christmas) was ripped open like a mad man on the couch of my fellow acquaintance and Halo 2 dominator, Splooge. After about 2 weeks of playing it, I feel that I am well enough acquainted to give you all the "low down" on it. Remember though, I am not that big of a fan of video games, so I may be a little more harsh than your fellow dweebs Nintendo Rules website.

Let's start with the first thing that you see: the design. Not bad, but you have to ask yourself: "who really designs the shape of this?" Right off the bat I was confused as to how to place it on the floor. Do I stand it up or lay it on its side? Half of the writing on the machine is written one way but the other half was written perpendicular to it. Needless to say, I was confused, and when I get confused, the design aspect of the Xbox gets a negative score. Sorry Xbox, but you should have made it easier for me to figure out.

Another question I had about the design is why the entire thing is white? Do black people not play video games? The last Xbox was black, why the change? We've all known that Microsoft was racist but we never expected such a violent display of it. Is it really so hard to mix the two colors together? It would leave you with some sort of grey shade, or you could do what the frozen yogurt machines do and get that swirl effect going on. Not only would that increase sales now that you would be satisfying both main races, but ice cream stores would prosper immensely and who knows, maybe they would give you a free frozen yogurt or something. Enough with the design, let's get going on the functionality.

Microsoft emphasizes the ease in which you can transfer your Live account onto the new system, but I beg to differ. The first question it asks for is your last 4 digits of your credit card, which I did not know. Once I finally figured them out (guess and check method, thank you 6th grade math class) I had to put in my address and my full name. Now I know you are all reading this and saying: "how easy is that?" but it's not that easy at all. You see, I am one of those random people who has not one but TWO middle names, one of which I only use with a certain credit card. I was guessing for some serious time before I finally figured out the correct set of credit card numbers, address, and name. Out of ten, I give this feature a fat 0 because it wasted way too much valuable playing time from an already confused / heartbroken brotha.

Once inside the Xbox 360 there is no escape… at least there is no visible escape. Unless you put a game into the tray, expect to spend well over 37 minutes wandering around the system settings trying to find the "exit" button. During my 38 minute experience with the system platform I learned that you can download games, store music, store profiles, and anything else lame and pointless you can think of on the systems powerful 20 gig hard drive.

The games I must say were about as good as I had expected… no more and definitely no less. The games I'm going to review are as follows: Perfect Dark Zero, Quake 4, and Call of Duty 2. I have played all three of these games on the Xbox 360 and was not tremendously impressed with what I saw, but here I go anyways.

Perfect Dark Zero is perfect for the power dork who likes bright colors in their playing experience. The only thing I remember about this game was seeing all the colors of the rainbow at the same time. I'm not sure if the game was designed to be this way, but in a word, it sucks. The game itself I guess looked pretty interesting, but the worst part about it is that you are some woman (who just happens to have a black woman sidekick… nice try Microsoft, we already know you are racists) who is breaking into a company called Data Dyne or something like that. First off, that in itself is pretty lame concept for a game. I mean what kind of security guard carries double uzies around on their patrol? I'm told that the multiplayer is pretty epic, but I have yet to find out first hand. This game was a "meh" at best. Definitely not easy on the eyes and looks as if Microsoft might have a couple seizure lawsuits on its greasy nards in the future.

Quake 4 is the next game on this list of 360 games, but I may as well not have reviewed it at all because you are probably not going to like what I have to say about it. Quake 4 is a disgrace to all third person shooter games EVERYWHERE! It is the same plot as all the other games and the only thing that makes the game cool is the amazing amount of swearing that the black characters do. Notice that I threw in the ethnicity; nice try again Microsoft, but I don't buy it. The worst part of this game is perhaps how ridiculously dark the indoors areas are. I understand that it's supposed to represent a "big spaceship crash" but come on; a ship travels through space and can't find a way to keep the lights on during a crash landing? Lame. This game is terrible, not even worth the rent, and you can "beliee dat." (Martin Lawrence).

Call of Duty 2: finally a game that didn't suck for the 360. This game was surprisingly fun but supper repetitive. It is an old war game based on the Russians kicking Germany right in the junk then the Americans coming in and dominating all over everyone. The game was fun for the first 30 minutes, but after a while I felt as though I was just doing the same old thing over and over again. And it wasn't the fun type of same old thing over and over again like in Halo, but the boring kind as in real life. I have to admit though, this game was pretty fun for a while and is probably the best game out for the Xbox 360 thus far.

Microsoft just announced the release day for Halo 3, which will only be available on the 360 system. You know that game is going to be epic so you guys may as well go out and buy yourselves a console simply for that game.

Hope you guys all liked my review. If you don't like it or want to complain, whateves, I don't really care, but you can email me, I'll just put you on my mailing list or something.