Official Xbox 360 Thread

[Prince Planet]

Anyway, even though I had no warranty, MS is fixing the thing for free, so I shouldn't bitch too much. In the meantime, I hit Best Buy (and its 30-day return policy) for a core.

Update: I received an email Saturday morning confirming the repair center's receipt of my 360. ONE HOUR LATER, I received a further email advising that it had been shipped, and I would receive it in 2-5 days. Receipt, service, and ship within an hour -- I guess MS has a pretty good handle on repairing their defective boxes by now. This thing had better work.

[Rumpy]

98% chance it's a refurb.

[Brand X]

It is a refurb. Check the serial number when it gets to you, it won't be the same one as you had before.

[Prince Planet]

Makes sense. Too bad I've heard that the refurbs haven't been what you'd call "reliable." We'll see.

[Port]

Typically, I associate refurb with 'still broken'. Hopefully that won't be the case for you.

[SpoDaddy]

You can get HD baseball with over-the-air HD broadcasts. From what I hear, the OTA stuff generally looks better than Comcast's stuff.

I have never heard of over-the-air HD broadcasts; what do I need to pick these up? I thought I needed a $100/month digital cable subscription for HD programming.

As for DVDs, I agree on waiting out the format war, but some of the discs will be hybrid (standard DVD plus Blu-ray or standard DVD plus HD-DVD). And the new players are backwards compatible. So if you buy a hybrid disc and pick the wrong format, it'll still play at 480p on the successful format's players.

I think at some point I might get the 360 HD-DVD add-on (I finally got my 360 yesterday, it is badass). I think an upscaling DVD player would be more useful for me, at least until the hybrid discs become more prevalent.

My first impressions of owning a 360:

A) I never realized just how awesome the controller is (even putting in the batteries is cool; it feels like loading a shotgun).

B) Maybe I was wrong; Gears of War is fucking brilliant. It might end up getting my vote for GOTY. It's almost impossible to read the text in SD though; do all 360 games have this issue?

C) I really wish it wasn't such a pain in the ass to get online. I'm currently trying to use my laptop as a router for the 360; the laptop is connected to my wireless network.

D) Gears of War owns.

[SpoDaddy]

FYI - Star Trek Legacy looks like a 1998 PC game and that's being generous. Can't quite comment yet on how it plays as I want to get further into it.

I was going to pick Legacy up this week. Is it anything like Tactical Assault or Starfleet Command?

[Dyne]

i believe there is a patch for the SD text, or at least they are working on one. there's a number of games that have that problem with text and not all have been fixed by their developers.

p.s. buy a fucking router.

[Wildkat]

God, all these deals are making it hard to wait for the new Hardware revision.

I have never heard of over-the-air HD broadcasts; what do I need to pick these up? I thought I needed a $100/month digital cable subscription for HD programming.

If your HDTV doesnt have an HD tuner built in you will need an external one and an antenna.

[SpoDaddy]

p.s. buy a fucking router.

I own a wireless router already, it's 5 rooms away from my 360.