XBOX 360

Yep, I have caved in for the publicity and bought me an Xbox 360. With Christmas there is a special action where you can buy the Xbox 360 (arcade) for 149 €. Since I received a 500 € bonus at work for a project I could not resist the temptation to buy one.

I already own a Playstation 2, so console gaming is not new to me. With the PS2 I bought any release game that interested me. Needless to say that at 60 € a game it became a very costly hobby. This time I vowed to take a different, less expensive approach. Basically I only buy one game a month and only when I finished the previous game. Old games will be sold immediately thru Ebay or thru retailers with buy back policies.

This also means that each game that I buy must be selected very carefully. Before I set out to buy the console, I did some reading on sites like IGN and Gamespot. I selected the best scoring games on these sites and watched their reviews.

In the end 3 games were selected:

• Grand Theft Auto 4
• Farcry 2
• Fall Out 3

GTA 4 is a game I know very well since I played all previous versions on the PS2. Therefore I did not select that one, because I feared I would just play the same game but with better graphics. The game is still on my shortlist, but for now there are other more interesting games to explore.

Farcry 2, did not appeal directly because its a shooter and I can't control the controllers (both on PS2 and XBOX) very well in a FPS game. The mouse and keyboard seem a more intuitive control to me. So Farcry 2 did not get selected.

Finally Fall Out 3, it promised a great story, a shooting scheme were you can pause the action to better select your target and at least 20 hours of fun. So Fall Out 3 became my first Xbox 360 game. I have been playing it now for about 8 hours and its indeed great fun.



After I bought Fall Out 3 I discovered the review for Dead Space. Looking back that game would also have been a contender (with its story line and graphics), yet now I'll have to wait untill I finish Fall Out 3. On the bright side , by the time I finish Fall Out 3 second hand cheaper version of Dead Space may already be available on ebay.