Mars is Green | by dmotion

I’ve been an extremely late adopter to the Xbox 360 and 111 days later I can tell you I’m impressed.

I got my Xbox on a whim on eBay for a whopping $40 with literally nothing–no hard drive,  no power cords, no a/v cables et cetera. It took me a couple days to find the 12.1amps power adapter to fit the “Jasper” Xbox I had obtained.

I went to an electronic parts store, bought the power adapter and picked up the original composite cables. I looked up the serial # and found it had a warranty till January 2013 and wasn’t banned. I was overjoyed. I had originally planned to purchase an Xbox at the time of the release of  ”Splinter Cell: Conviction” and the bundle it came with back in April 2010.

Then I decided to wait to see if  Ubisoft ported it to the PS3 at a later date. However they didn’t and I argued one game for one console…eh… –but for $40 why not?

I already had “Splinter Cell: Conviction” Collector’s Edition.

I was fortunate though I had purchased the game via OnLive and had been playing it for a year on the service having logged 137 hours on Splinter Cell. The quality for OnLive games varies on one’s bandwidth and other variables as well however the picture displayed is surprisingly very good. I am not to fond of the keyboard controls–at least for this game and opted to buy a wired Xbox 360 controller to play via OnLive. (I think Microsoft should acquire OnLive and implement it’s infrastructure to the console. They can afterwards polish it up. The subscription playpack would be paid for by Xbox live and the on demand games would truly be on-demand playable within seconds.)

So when I obtained the Xbox 360 I had a controller and one game.

After acquiring it I decided I would play solely the exclusives on the System and that I did. Previously I had desired to Play Fable II and Fable III  having seen the adverts to it…same thing for the Gears of War trilogy–soon to be four.

I have played the Xbox more in 3 months than I have the PS3 in a whole year.

Games I’ve Recently Played:

The multiplayer match-ups, the xbox party features and UI aesthetics have  left me repentant as to why I had not purchased one sooner.

My only gripes would be load times are longer (at least you don’t have the mandatory install thing like PS3)–the pop up/in graphics, the occasional hiccup freezes and how loud the Xbox is in general.

Although these things I have easily accustomed at the beginning were annoying.

Also the achievements make playing video games, games in and of themselves. Yes, PS3 has trophies but they are not as evident or spotlighted.

I am happy to say that in these few short months the Xbox has become my console of choice and I’m looking forward to playing some of the upcoming titles: