Friday, October 21, 2005

So I touched a 360 controller today.

Comment Commentary

Mimmi- What you can't tell is that it's full of shit.

Alex- Most of these aren't like that though. In fact, they're pretty anti-Mormon Mormons.

Andy- Actually, no. Not really. Nothing happens at all, come to think of it. :/

Ken- Weren't you, back in the days of yore, part of some sort of religious minority that demanded converts or something?

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There have been reports floating around recently about Walmarts getting Xbox 360 kiosks in, so today I went to my local Walmart to see if they had one in yet.

Our Walmart is the first Super Walmart in the state, which is some sort of achievement, apparently. We've had it for two months and today was the first time I have been in it. Something about it feels very unholy- everyone walks around very dismally, and the ceiling is lower than our old Walmart, so it's more claustrophobic. There's wood floors everywhere (instead of carpet), and even though everything else is shiny and new, the McDonalds managed to get nasty-looking already. Props to them on that.

Anyway, I went back into the games section, saw the pretty 360 sign, and saw the console and controller underneath it.

The controller's sort of a conflicting issue for me. On one hand, the thing is generally comfortable as hell to hold. The buttons feel more or less like the regular Xbox's, the control sticks were a little more "loose" than the originals (though not in a bad way), and that circular "360 button" at the top worked well enough.

But the shoulder buttons pose a bit of a problem, as I have been worrying about since I've seen the first controller images. For those of you who are used to the PS2's "access all four triggers at one time," I'm afraid you won't have much of that luxury on the 360. The two analog triggers and two "buttons" are rather far apart, so that you can't use your index and middle fingers to hit them all at once without feeling a sharp pain in your joints. I guess that's not a problem for some- most of the people I've seen playing PS2s only use their index fingers anyway- but it's an odd feeling for me.

The interface wasn't as orgasmic as everyone else was saying, as far as I could tell. The framerate was rather choppy, and when you tried to bring the popup dashboard feature in-game there was a bit of slowdown, or even lag. The colors were pretty though.

And then come the actual games. The only playable demos were Kameo: Elements of Power, Call of Duty 2 and King Kong. The one I spent most of my time on was Call of Duty, since it managed to grab my interest from the beginning.. Pretty standard WW2 FPS affair, I guess. The particle effects were crazy (smoke grenades for the win), but the character models left something to be desired. Very current-gen, and the whole "plastic look" made polygons very, very visible. There was a similar problem with Kameo, but that was mostly in the opening sequence and not actual gameplay.

But yeah, I didn't have the time to get a hold of Kameo or King Kong's controls, so I can't comment much on the actual gameplay, but I do know that Kameo had wonderful lighting and fur effects, while King Kong has transcended some of the plastic-ness of 360 games.. Though the T-Rex was very shiny, and the girl (whom you hold while fighting, apparently, though you can let her down) looked.. Pretty bad from what I saw. Its lack of quality reminded me of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, for some reason. I didn't get a chance to play the human part of the game.

There was also a very pretty Project Gotham Racing 3 video that showed mostly environments and the outside of cars (as well as the oh-so-impressive crowds). Nothing about the first-person camera mode, which is what I was mostly interested in.

Even with all of the stuff there, though, there was absolutely nothing about Perfect Dark Zero.

So, yeah, overall it was sort of "Meh." If there was an Elder Scrolls IV demo (I know the playtesting version took about an hour, but.. I want gameplay ;_;) or some sort of Gears of War or in-game PGR3 footage, I might have been more impressed. Not mind-blowing like I had been hoping, but this sort of sealed my "wait for price drop" mentality.

Though my friend's sister works at Walmart and could get me a 10% discount, which would bring the grand total of the console by itself to $360.

Cute.

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Also, my friend bought a Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children bootleg at a local anime convention recently, and he let Ethan borrow it, so I was planning on watching that at his house after school.

Unfortunately, he didn't have a key to get in, so we just sat in his front yard for a while, and then went to someone else's house, where we planned on using their DVD player but ended up eating Chewy Chips Ahoy cookies instead.
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