I did finally buy a 360 on Thursday, so let me give some advice to other people who might be thinking of doing the same, so they don’t make the same mistake as I.
If you’re like me, you’ve taken an active interest in “Xbox Live Arcade.” In fact, except for Dead Rising, you may very well only be interested in the Live Arcade games. Microsoft sells something called the “Xbox 360 Arcade.” Surely this is what we need! Well, it isn’t. In fact it is the worst system to get if you want to play a bunch of Xbox Live Arcade games.
It doesn’t come with a hard drive, for starters. It does come with a 256 MB memory card, which is fine, except Braid takes 144 MB. So that’s over half of it gone from starters. Space Giraffe was another 44 MB, and suddenly tensions are high on the card with everyone crammed together. Doesn’t particularly help that I managed to lose the receipt, too, so I couldn’t take the thing back for a better version.
On the other hand, I DID get to do everything I wanted when I got home. I bought some Microsoft points and was playing Braid and Space Giraffe. Pac-Man: Championship Edition comes on a DVD with the system, so that was five bucks saved. And I loooOOOoOve the wireless controller. It really works! I feel like I am reporting from 1985 and just finished up with the PCjr’s wireless keyboard. I guess in the last 13 years they got the glitches ironed out.
I’m going to have to get a hard drive for the thing, and it looks like prices are coming down on eBay. Microsoft wants $100 for a 20 GB drive, which is laughable – so an auction site is my best bet. If it gets in the neighborhood of $30 for a 20 GB drive, I might have made out after all.
(And I have been enjoying the hell out of Braid and Space Giraffe, with Warlords and Bionic Commando up next.)
I was there during this exchange and I seriously thought Robb was going to start frothing at the mouth at old Wally World.