Chroder.com

I felt the need to post since I haven’t said anything for a while (I say that just about every time, don’t I?).

Last weekend I went out and got myself an X-Box 360. Anyone who knows me knows that I’m not much of a gamer, but I still like to sit down and blow some monsters to smithereens with a rocket launcher (or some variation of such). And keeping my PC up to date to play games when I hate using Windows seemed counter-intuitive. So, getting an xb360 seemed the logical choice. The Wii is interesting but not my cup o’ tea, and the PS3 looks pretty crappy so far and is too expensive for what you get — so that was out (perhaps a purchase for the future when the price goes down and the quality comes up).

I didn’t want to spend too much, so I haven’t got any games that weren’t default with the package. I got the ‘pro’ package that my local retailer was offering. So I got the hard drive, the Live headset, wireless controller etc. and it came with 4 games: some ridge racer game that I have yet to try, FarCry which is a very cool game, a DVD full of X-Box arcade games (the ones you would normally buy from the ‘Marketplace’) and Ghost Recon which is faulty. Just my luck that the one game I really liked out the bunch — Ghost Recon — was the one that had to be faulty. So I’ve gotta go back over there and tell them to give me a new one. Since the game came with the system (it was in the actual X-Box box), I’m worried they’re going to tell me I need to bring back the entire console for an exchange. If that is the case, it’ll be a real pain in the ass.

When I told my parents I was getting an X-Box 360, my dad jumped in and said that if I was getting an X-Box, then he was going to get a new HDTV. The look on my mom’s face when he said that was pretty funny. There was a look of aghast that was followed by a firm “you will do no such thing”. Quite interesting to see how persistence on my dad’s part paid off (at least in this case!). After a few days, the protests finally turned into a resigned acceptance. So on Saturday we went out and got a 37″ widescreen HDTV. It looks really good!

The HDTV also came with a free year of digital cable so we went out and got a set-top box from the cable company. After setting everything up it looked pretty good, but it didn’t take long for us to notice that normal cable looks like shit compared to other non-HD media. It’s a bit blurry. Apparently it has something to do with the box not properly upscaling the SD cable media or something like that. This HD stuff is totally confusing. But the cable guy is coming over tomorrow to unlock some channels we now get with the digital service, so I’ll ask him about it. I hope he’s just not a typical know-nothing technician…

Also my sister came down for a visit for the weekend. She almost died on the drive here. There was a big snowstorm sweeping over the city when they left so it was quite slippery. While going 120km/h on the highway, the driver lost control and they almost tipped right over and landed in a ditch, but she swerved and managed to stay upright. Instead of tipping, they sped into oncoming traffic where they amazingly managed to avoid a head on collision and just scraped the side of some guys car. Lucky or what!

So that’s about all that needs telling I think.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 2:48 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.