Jolt Country

Can someone help. Ima a get one next month.

- I connect to Xbox Live through a simple network cable, right? Nothing else going on? This won't be a problem for me since I have a router next to my original Xbox.

- A "silver" account is free and lets me connect to Xbox Live Arcade, right?

- Do I need a hard drive for any Xbox Live Arcade games?

- How do I go about buying them? I know they have some stupid "Xbox Points" thing or whatever. When I get this beast home, I want to buy all the games I haven't shut up about the last year (Space Giraffe, Pac-Man and Braid for starters). Do I need to get points from the Gamestop first, on one of those cards? HOW DO I BUY THINGS?

Okay, I guess that is it.

I just learned all of this last weekend. You just need an ethernet cord. You DO NOT need the special Xbox one, even though they may tell you that. You also need to have an msn address. As far as I know, that was the only address that they would allow. I could be wrong on that aspect though. The Silver Membership gives you access to everything the gold has. The benefit of the Gold is that you can play other people over the net. When you download games, it saves it right to the hard drive. Ben and I have just the regular Xbox 360 and it has a large enough drive on it. I guess that would depend on how many games you intend to get, but it's fine for us. Once you set everything up, you can go onto the "marketplace" and get everything you need. You can buy the points there and buy the membership if you want to. Everything to buy and download is at the marketplace. Then once it's downloaded, it stores it in your "games" area. The way Xbox is set up there are different tabs you can access. "Marketplace" "Live" "Options" that kind of thing. It was a little tricky at first setting everything up, at least it was for me, but once you see the format, it's pretty easy.

And that's it. The only downside I've seen is that it isn't wireless. I'm sure the next version will have that, but this one is ethernet.

Hope that helps you out.

uhg wait. I only recommended a xbox arcade version because you wanted it to be 299. You'll need a hard drive for braid and shit I think (you can put it on your memory card but I think it's not big enough)

Waitasec, Worm. The Xbox 360 Arcade does not play all Xbox Live Arcade games? Are you fucking shitting me?

(And thank you, Kat, for all of that - I knew none of that, so thank you!)

We have the less expensive 360 and it fits Braid just fine. We have about 10-20 games and we have so much memory left to go it's not funny. I think you will be fine. Xbox is not the same as Playstation with a memory card. Trust me, you will be fine unless you download every game imagineable. We have Braid and a trial of Pac Man. Braid was only a few MBs.

I just checked a little further into this...

There is an arcade version that does not have a hard drive. Best Buy offers that one for 279.99 and for 299.99 they have one with the 20gb Hard drive. I say pay the extra money and it's a lot easier. Plus there are some specials out there right now that will give you a wireless controller for free if you buy a game (or something like that). It's worth it to do a little research and see what is best for you.

Yeah, 20 gigabytes is plenty.

Pro tips!

You can buy the points or Gold memberships via the menus, but you can get them cheaper from eBay or Amazon. Ie, 3 months gold for 12 dollars instead of 15-18. The same applies for the points you use to buy games and content; on eBay, you are going to get a better "exchange rate" as you can buy batches of 2100 points.

Unfortunately, the same does not hold true for Wii Points :(

OK, I did not know about the points being cheaper on eBay. They got no cheaper at any point I saw going through my actual 360.

And I have to grab the new Galaga, as well as Bionic Commando and a few others. So I need those points!

Bionic Commando Rearmed is my Game of the Year 2008 so far. No joke. We'll have to see how Stalker: Clear Sky and Fallout 3 shape up, but if they disappoint it'll be BCR.