Editor's Note: The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the entirety of Guttergamers’ Paradise, ApolloMatrix, or BlueHell Media. (But damn it, the editor happens to personally agree with this one, so it's staying up.)

I finally bit the bullet and bought a 360 (My gamertag is taitaisanchez, not that I'll be on XBL Gold after the first free month or so).  At $199 for a 20 gig refurb, it felt like a steal.  Click past the jump to get my impressions of it.

I finally bit the bullet and bought a 360 (My gamertag is taitaisanchez, not that I'll be on XBL Gold after the first free month or so).  At $199 for a 20 gig refurb, it felt like a steal.  Click past the jump to get my impressions of it.
 
This thing is the WORST game console in the history of console gaming.  Usability is shit, the stock gamepad is garbage, and the games just aren't that great.  Nearly everything is locked down and Microsoft is stingy with what should be pack-ins.  People who complain about an HD cable being left out of the PlayStation 3 forget that while Sony wants $25 for an component HD cable, MS wants $100 for a WiFi dongle, $40 for a VGA cable and you can't get analog audio through your packed in AV cable and digital video through your HDMI port unless you cough up 50 bucks for the kit.

Or take a Leatherman tool to your AV cables.

Even if this thing is easier to develop for (The learning curve for coding efficiently on the PS3 isn't as bad as the relative difference between Saturn and PlayStation 1), Sony knows that I already probably own a set of component cables from the previous generation, they also know that if I've got HDMI, I might want to use analog audio out through the AV cables.  Sony also knows I probably have USB controllers and wouldn't mind using those.  They're compatible.  Want more controllers on 360?  Cough up.  Want a bigger HDD?  Cough up.  Want online that actually means something?  Cough up.  Themes? Gamer Tag pictures?  Keep coughing up bucko.  This is a motif in the life of a 360 gamer.  Cough up, cough up, cough up.  Keep spending those MS points.  Gotta’ get more, gotta get more.

NXE is shit too.  NXE is complete shit.  The interface is slow and forces you to wait for all of the onscreen resources to load.  The XMB isn't like this, neither is the Wii home menu, but that's like comparing apples and potato pancakes.  The good news about NXE is that it ditched the fact that every other blade you were looking at had ads everywhere.

The controller itself is worthless.  The add-on thumb board is nice, better than Sony's thumb board for the SIXAXIS.  Doesn't change the fact that the DPad is worthless, and that the left stick is in the wrong place.  Comparing the thumb sticks is pretty difficult.  They're thumb sticks.  It's pretty hard to get wrong, unless you put a needlessly weird octagonal restrictor on them.  Nintendo, I'm looking in your direction.  Anyway, buttons on the 360 should've been on the SIXAXIS, seeing as how it's easier to feel when the button has started to engage and when it hasn't.  The SIXAXIS doesn't.  The problem with this is, on the 360, the buttons aren't pressure sensitive anymore.  At all.  The triggers obviously still are, but the controller itself? 

Nope. 

Lame, Microsoft. 

Really. 

Lame.

I will give Microsoft's white crap box a lot of credit in one aspect though, and it's one that trumps the PS3 pretty hard.  UPnP client.  PS3 is tops as a general physical media player due to Blu-Ray support, but as a UPnP streaming device?  Forget it.  I'd rather hassle with hooking my laptop up via HDMI than mess with it.  Plus Netflix.  Netflix support is top notch once you get it working.  It crashed several times during the install process, but once I got installed, and I activated it with the code, everything at that point was pretty much gravy.  Nearly all of the videos I threw at the 360 pretty much worked.  I needed a download an update to get it to play AAC and MPEG 4 but other than that...

One last thing that really got my goat with this thing were all the updates I had to do.  I turned it on.  Needs NXE.  Connect to XBL?  Needs update.  Connect to Netflix?  Needs update.  UPnP?  Needs update.  Why not just roll it all into a single package?  That seems pretty pointless to do all of that updating.

I'm keeping it around because there are games I want for it and it's strengths as a UPnP client, but I'm not broken up I waited this long to get one.  Microsoft can eat ass and die for all I care.  They shouldn't be making consoles.  They have a rather flawed design philosophy.  It's not about what could be done better; it's about what makes the user happy.  If generations of Windows products can prove one thing, it's that once people are used to mediocrity, they'll demand it.  Users get used to lax security environments then the second you tighten them up, everyone bitches.  Users get used to broken driver models, then you clean up the driver model and everyone complains that the system is now wildly unstable because they're using broken drivers (Vista and ME, respectively.)

The Xbox360 is mediocrity incarnate.  And it's also selling like hot cakes.  This makes me sad.