My God The 360 Is A Crappy Console

broken_xbox So I ended up staying up late, got really bored and as I’ve mostly being playing my PC games for a while, specifically multiplayer focused one, I’ve ended up nicking my housemates 360 Elite. What is written beyond this point is going to hurt your sensibilities if you have stocks in MSFT. Or at least act like you do. So beware all who enter.

First act is to sign in. I already have a XBL/GFWL account so let’s sign in. I sign out of my housemates XBL ac count then go to sign into mine. Where the hell is the sign in option? I can pick from one of my ancient sub accounts just labelled Dean, but where’s my XBL account I want to sign into that. A quick query later it turns out I sign in with the rather risky sounding ‘Recover Gamertag’. Pretty weird choice of words for ‘sign in’ don’tcha think?

ProfileBlade-RecoverGamertag2-XboxDashboard So I go to use that and… herp derp 360’s aren’t wireless. FFUUUU. I guess I’m just used to moving consoles between rooms and them just being connected to the net that I kinda forgot this part when plugging in the 360. Thankfully there’s a spare ethernet cable long enough. So get that wired up, test connection and we’re golden. Yeah I guess that moving between rooms isn’t really an expected activity for consoles but I can see it being done often enough. Say the kids play MW2 in their room, but bring the console down at night to watch films or play Kinect. But it is a pretty gross oversight to not include wireless, it’s not like it was a brand new feature back when the 360 was being made. Even the cheapo wii includes it. Thankfully the 360s has fixed this oversight, but we don’t have a 360s so moot point.

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Now I’m net connected lets ‘Recover Gamertag’. On-screen keyboard is in ABC mode. It’s like some ‘Fisher Price My First Keyboard’. What is this shit? Microsoft make Operating Systems and PC software as their main job, how have they managed to not use a standard qwerty layout? The Wii has a qwerty layout. A console made for kids. How does the 360 still have this? And after several years of software updates? It boggles the mind. Thankfully I’m only going to use this once and it’s not too horrendous a layout, unlike the PS3/PSP default of a phone style layout. After putting in my details I am now signed into my XBL account. Did MS really need to make it such an unnecessarily long and painful experience? Steam I sit down at a random PC sign in wait a few seconds and boom access to my account, achievements and if I want I can download any games or DLC I own. And apparently PC gaming is complicated.

So a brief aside but I’m on a 1080p TV via HDMI compared to my housemate on 720p with component cables. So I thought I’d change display settings to 1080p, the 720p was showing a bit rough on the edges. Turns out it was automatically running in 1080p. MS might want to run a bit of AA on the hovering 360 logo and their avatars.

As I’ve not touched a 360 for a while my Avatar was a bit outdated. I’ve had a fair change in hairstyles since last time. Also it seems I’d gained eye shadow at some point (thanks Ben). This was actually pretty simple to update, fairly intuitive process. Why is the rest of it not like this? Shame you can’t do a palette swap on clothes, but no biggy.

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Now I’m all ready lets boot up some Dead Rising. Since the sequel is due soon it’s a game worth playing while I wait for access to the rest of the houses 360 games. Any word if the 360s has a quieter disc drive?

Once I’m in the game I’m all fine and dandy. 360 games are pretty good, and Dead Rising is certainly somewhat unique. Shame its shackled to such a badly made and unintuitive console experience.

Oh feel free to absolutely tear me apart if you want.