Updated 13 Feb, 2012, 6:30 pm IST

The 360 Effect

09 Sep, 2006, 5:33 pm IST | Avinash Bali

I�ve waited and watched, patiently sitting in the shadows while the rest of the Western world enjoyed next generation gaming, courtesy of Microsoft�s Xbox 360.

The 360 Effect

Now, onto Xbox Live! The cool part here is that as and when you purchase the console you get a one month gold package absolutely free, which means you can download game/movie videos, demos, themes and so on free of cost for an entire month. As and when this free subscription ends, you can either renew your gold subscription for an annual fee of $ 50 (that’s nearly 2400 bucks) or you can go ahead and sign up for the silver package, which is totally free.

Now all this is fine and dandy, but signing up to Xbox Live is not easy task; you need lots and lots of patience because you’ll have to answer a never ending barrage of questions and typing in your name, MSN passport, IP Address, DNS (Domain Name Server) blah blah blah is a cumbersome process with the controller (yes I know, we could have plugged in a keyboard, but you have to understand our excitement permitted us to think rationally).

Once that long and tedious journey of signing up is over, it’s a smooth ride all the way as you can hit the Xbox Live Marketplace to download all the above mentioned stuff or trial versions of the arcade games like Geometry Wars, Uno and so on.

I know I haven’t mentioned how sleek the console looks or how bulky the adapter is, or how customizable the faceplate (which we yet have to get by the way) is but these things were universally known facts so I don’t think repeating them would make sense.

In the end, no matter how good all this sounds, I really wouldn’t recommend purchasing the 360 as of now, because first of all (and this is the most important reason) you will not be able to achieve the optimum visual level unless and until you have a HDTV, which we all know costs as much as cars nowadays. Secondly, games are really expensive and we unfortunately don’t have any sort of service here that allows us to rent them. You could wile away your time by downloading demos (provided you have good speeds as most of them are 500 MB upwards), but rest assured, you will get bored of them in like a day. Sure, you could listen to music or watch a DVD but I really don’t think you’d pay Rs 20,000 to do just that right?

My suggestion would to be to wait and watch and take a call only when MS launches the console, Xbox Live and a healthy library of games this Diwali.

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Tags: Microsoft , XBox360 , Perfect Dark Zero , Dead or Alive 4 , Xbox Live , Geometry Wars