I had the recent opportunity to pick a few Xbox 360’s and decided to keep one for myself and play it. About a week or two ago I wrote an article about upscaling on DVD players and how it might work. The Xbox 360 does just that and here is what I think about the system.
At first the box seemed a little heavier than normal consoles and it felt like there was a PC being shipped in the box. I unpacked it and quickly hooked it up to my Sharp 32″ Aquos LCD. The first thing that I noticed was the amazing feature to finally turn the console on with the wireless controller. The Xbox logo on the controller was actually a power switch to the system. The first screen that came up was the initial setup of the system. If you have an HDTV you must put in the setting here and select 720p and boy was it beautiful in widescreen.
The next thing that I noticed was that the system was quite loud. You can hear the cooling fan on the console. I thought this thing was liquid cooled? Guess not. I downloaded a Windows Media Center add-on for Windows XP and it recognized my 360. The whole purpose of this is to share your pictures, music, and movies streaming from the PC over your LAN. Quite cool and nerdy, just what we like. The beauty of this feature is that now you can put your own soundtracks on racing games and other games if the feature exists. And you may also change the background pic of your Xbox dashboard.
Then I put in Matrix Revolutions. When I played the movie on my PS2, it looked grainy and definitely was not fun watching it on my HDTV. Now that my Xbox will upscale the DVD from 480i to 480p, the movie looks sweet! By no means, does it look even close to 1080i or 720p but it looks a hell of a lot better than my PS2. I’m not saying go out and buy an upscaling DVD player, but if your Xbox can do it, why bother. Besides, Microsoft has announced an add-on HD-DVD player for just movies. We’ll see how that goes.I don’t think it was smart not to offer a built-in HD-DVD player. Boo.
So overall, it was definitely worth seeing NBA 2K6 on the HD setting and the guys literally pop out of the screen. I’ve never seen a game that had no slow down with these type of graphics. Simply Amazing. Now that the console has made me lazier and $425 lighter, it was all worth it watch virtual Shaq dunk all over Kobe’s dumb ass. So if you have an HDTV and $425 to burn, buy it.
