I bought an Xbox 360 Elite in June 08, and I have to say that in terms of game variety, graphics and online gameplay and downloads, it does not dissapoint. I’ve enjoyed playing games such as GTA IV, Bioshock, Call of Duty and Halo 3 with most games being played to their full potential with xbox live. The 120GB hard drive is a good investment too, especially as the new xbox update has arrived allowing games to be stored directly on the memory which improves loading times and reduces the noise of the disc drive. The disc drive itself is noisy when compared to the Wii or Playstation 3 when spinning an xbox 360 disc, but it’s not something particularly noticeable when actually playing a game. The main negative for the console, which many, many people have been having problems with, is the console’s reliability. After 5 1/2 months when I went to switch on my xbox it kept flashing 1 red light, saying it had a system error and that I needed to contact xbox customer support. I know about 7 people directly who have an xbox and 6 of them have had at least one problem which has rendered the console useless. I also know a gamer online who states that, “My xbox used to crash once a week, now it crashes every 15 minutes. “ I didn’t actually contact xbox with the problem, I found that I my xbox had a general hardware failure and I took it back to the store I bought it from the next day. I had the machine swapped and took out 3 years worth of insurance for it with the actual store. If I had contacted microsoft with the problem after my 12 months warrenty then they would have refused to repair or replace it without a £65 payment. I would recommend that if you are thinking of buying this console then:- 1. Buy it from a reputable source, such as amazon. co. uk or one of the main videogame/electrical stores. 2. Check to see if it is possible to take out insurance on the console with the actual source, preferably for at least 2 years. 3. Look after the receipt. Seriously I do know people that can’t take their xbox back to the store they bought it from because they didn’t do this. So all together I would recommend the console, just make sure to have some kind of insurance plan that involves you and the store you buy the console from as they are not built nearly as well as the other consoles available on the market.

If you’re like me, you’ll be absolutely sick of reading the glut of pathetic, immature “reviews” left for each of the three next-gen consoles by teenage fanboys with ridiculous prejudices for/against the various manufacturers. Well, I own all three machines and I’m far too old for all that ‘Nintendo Roolz, Sony Sux!” garbage, so let me offer you my objective opinions on each of the systems. They all have good points and they each have a couple of negatives too. I’m not going to tell you which is ‘best’ or which you should buy, just give my impressions. The X-Box 360 – The first next-gen console to be released, with worldwide sales now at almost 12 million. The 360 is about 18 months old, which means it has a far bigger library of games available than either of the competitors, and a number of those games are excellent, including PGR4, Oblivion, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Viva Pinata, Lost Planet, Forza 2, Dead Rising and of course Gears Of War. There are also an impressive number of forthcoming exclusives to look forward to, with Bioshock, Lost Odyssey, Mass Effect and the mighty Halo 3 all due before Christmas. It has a DVD player, but HD-DVD is not built in – you have to buy a seperate unit (this was probably a wise decision on MS’s part, because it seems the rival BluRay format is proving more popular, at least in the USA). It has a terrific online service, Live, which costs about £3 a month and is well worth it. Even if you don’t play games online, there is a ton of content to download such as trailers and demos of new games, and you can also buy extra levels / expansion packs for some. There’s also XBox Live Arcade, with a wide range of reasonably-priced ‘casual’ games available to download. The quality of these titles varies greatly, but there are a good few such as Worms and Castlevania which are well worth the money. The console itself is fairly big but still aesthetically pleasing, and at about £250 for a premium kit (I wouldn’t advise getting the cheaper ‘core’ kit, because you really need the hard drive) it’s fairly reasonably priced. HOWEVER, it does have a couple of problems. The initial batch of consoles released at launch and soon after have proved notoriously unreliable, with about 20 – 25% of them overheating and breaking down. Microsoft now include a three-year warranty, which means you can get a free replacement, but although the percentage of breakdowns has markedly decreased, it IS still happening – and while a long warranty is very nice, I’m sure most people would be more impressed with some improvements made to the system to try to prevent these problems. I bought a 360 at launch and it died about six months later – then I got a replacement which has been fine ever since (touch wood). Apparently, if you keep your 360 in the horizontal rather than the vertical position, it is less likely to develop a fault – but still, it really shouldn’t be developing faults at all. MS is working on a cooler model, which should be ready by Christmas and will hopefully see an end to all these hardware problems. The other issue with the 360 is that it is horribly noisy when playing a game or watching a DVD. The DVD drive is soon to be replaced – by the end of this year, apparently – with a far quieter, cooler model. If you had an early PS2, you may remember how noisy that was, but after the drive model was changed it became much quieter. If you think the noise could be an issue for you, you may be better off waiting until Christmas when the 360 will have its new components fitted. My overall rating for the 360 so far: 4. 5 stars The Wii – Nintendo’s Wii is the smallest, cheapest and quietest of the three consoles, and the big selling point is its motion-sensing technology. Wii games are controlled with two gamepads instead of the usual one; the Remote and the Nunchuck (although some of the simpler games don’t use the Nunchuck). The idea behind this is to make games easier to play for people who aren’t used to a traditional controller, and it can certainly prove fun when you have a party or just some friends round. The console does have an online service, which is free to join, and it has its own ‘Live Arcade’ equivalent called the Virtual Console. Here you can buy and download past Nintendo titles from the NES all the way through to the N64. As with the XBox service, the quality of titles available varies widely, but there are definitely some classics there including Super Mario 64 and Ocarina Of Time. The rest of the online service consists of ‘Channels’, where you can find news, weather, and opinion polls. The Wii has only been out for about 7 months, so it has a fairly small library of games so far, but these do include a new Zelda game, new Wario Ware and Mario Party titles and Resident Evil 4 (if you haven’t already played it). The Wii is proving very popular at the moment, having sold about 6 million consoles in its realtively short lifetime, BUT it definitely has its downsides. First off, it has no DVD support – although so many people have a DVD player now, that isn’t really much of an issue. The online service may be free, but it has very little content other than the Virtual Console games I mentioned, and there are very few proper Wii games so far that support online play. The games themselves are also a problem – the Wii has a pretty poor range so far, and apart from a couple of big Ninetndo titles such as Metroid and Super Mario Galaxy, ther isn’t a whole lot to get excited about for the rest of 2007 either. A huge proportion of Wii games are either puzzle titles or collections of mini-games, and other genres such as shooters and RPGs are woefully under-represented. This is mostly the fault of lazy third-party developers, who seem to be short on ideas about how to implement the Wii’s unique controls. The Wii is also technically far outclassed by its two rivals; at best Wii games look the same as Gamecube titles, and some of them barely match the seven-year-old PS2 in the visual department. Of course, graphics and sound quality aren’t as important as gameplay, but they do make a significant contribution to a game’s level of immersion, so this is definitely a problem. Lastly, the Wii’s biggest feature, the motion-sensing controls, are not all they’re cracked up to be. Sure, on simple games like Wii Sports they are easy to grasp and work brilliantly, but on more complex titles you find yourself not only having to remember button combinations but specific movements at the same time, which can actually make some Wii games more of a pain to play than their XBox and PS3 equivalents. If you have kids, or you only play games with friends or at parties, the Wii can be a lot of fun, as it has far more ‘family friendly’ and sociable games than its rivals. However, for mature gamers who want a wide range of titles or who enjoy online play, the Wii is a far less attractive prospect then the PS3 or 360. My overall rating for the Wii so far: 3 stars The Playstation 3 - The newest and most expensive of the three consoles. So far, the PS3 hasn’t made much of an impression on the market; Sony are being very cagey about actual sales figures, but it’s estimated PS3 sales worldwide could be as low as just 2 million so far. However, the PS3 actually does have a lot to offer – if you can afford it. It had a built-in BluRay drive, and BluRay discs have significantly larger storage capacity than the HD-DVDs the 360 uses. The system hasn’t got a massive library of games available yet, but it already has a handful of great titles such as Resistance, Ninja Gaiden Sigma and Motorstorm, with promising future games like Unreal Tournament 3, Haze, Lair and Heavenly Sword all due by the end of the year. As with the 360, the best PS3 games look great on a standard TV and absolutely stunning in HD. Despite constant petty quarrels between fanboys, right now there is no real difference in quality between the two systems, and certainly no PS3 game so far can hold a candle to Gears Of War; however, that may change in the future. The PS3’s online features are free, and are definitely better than the Wii’s service (although still a long way behind XBox Live). The console is very large and weighs a ton, but is much quieter than the 360 and there seem to be few complaints about it overheating or breaking down. Finally, Sony have been the leading player in the games industry for over ten years, so it would perhaps be unwise to bet against them this time round. The PS3 has had a bumpy start and may well not win the console ‘war’ this generation, but I’m sure it will eventually find a significant audience. By far the biggest problem with the PS3 is its price. It’s true that, if you take into account the inclusion of the BluRay player in the system, it actually represents good value, and it may prove to be a good selling point in the future, but right now very few people care about either BluRay or HD-DVD, and it will be several years before either format will be replacing DVDs as the general public’s format of choice. I suspect many gamers would happily give up the BluRay support in exchange for a big price reduction. Sony have actually just announced a price cut for the PS3 in the USA, but here in Europe we’re not getting one – we’re getting a ‘value pack’ instead, which seems like a big mistake. Like the Wii, the PS3 controller has motion-sensing technology, but in Sony’s case it’s a bit of a half-hearted gesture which few games have so far taken advantage of. What’s worse is that the motion control was included at the expense of any rumble feature – although after an outcry from irate gamers, Sony have announced the rumble will be added back sometime next year. Online gaming is growing all the time, and while Sony have made a better stab at it than Nintendo, they are still light years behind Microsoft in the online arena. The Playstation Store has trailers, damos and casual games, like XBox Live, but there is a meagre amount of content available so far. However, they wil be starting a new online service called ‘Home’ at the end of this year which looks like it could be interesting, although it will have a long way to go to equal the reliability and ease of use of the well-e3stablished XBox Live service. My overall rating for the PS3 so far: 4 stars So, that’s my take on the three new consoles. They all have good points and they all have potential; if you are a dedicated gamer and you have the cash, you owe it to yourself to buy all three. If you refuse to consider one of the systems because of some absurdly juvenille prejudice, you are only hurting yourself because it will be you who misses out on that system’s exclusive games. If you only need or can only afford one of the three, which one you should choose depends very much on what you want from a gaming console; I hope my impressions may have helped a little with your decision. Whichever you choose, I’m sure you’ll have some great times with it.

Well, I’ve had a few hours with our Xbox 360 Elite wherein we’ve done nothing but test it against the most rigorous (unscientific) means at our disposal. But finally we are able to answer the question: is an HDMI-enabled Xbox 360 capable of outputting noticeably higher quality game play and movies? We compared our classic Xbox 360 (manufactured 2005) with our spanking’ new 360 Elite (manufactured 2007). Ready for the face-off? Check out the gallery, and read on for our conclusions. I tested the consoles with a Sharp (46-inch) 1080p LCD and a 5. 1 surround system — we went HDMI vs. component, since it’s safe to assume the majority of people don’t have VGA inputs on their HDTV’s (including us). We played the first stage of Gears of War (on casual, so what?), and then plugged in our HD DVD drive and watched a few scenes from Batman Begins. Console noise I know how much you all wanted your Xbox 360 Elite to quiet down a bit, but we have some bad news for you. As we heard from our sources who supplied us with much of our info about the Elite, unfortunately the noise level is about the same as before. It doesn’t use the new 65nm chips, so it seems to require the same number of case fans. The same is true of the disc drive. Our Elite and classic drives do sound different, and it’s obvious they’re not the same make or model. However, unfortunately, they’re equally loud. Sorry guys, you’re still going to have to put up with the same level of noise as before — don’t come looking to the Elite for something that sounds less like a shop-vac. Heat As we said before, these are using the old round of 90nm chips, not the 65nm variety. So it goes without saying that using the same chips as before, these things are going to produce the same amount of heat. We didn’t run an 18 hour stress test or anything (obviously), but both units did feel about the same after an hour of playing games and movies, and they both felt like they were outputting about the same amount of heat. HDMI 1080p vs. component 1080p/i we’re going to be totally honest here, we hardly noticed a damn difference at all. We figured the best visual test would be playing in 1080p on both HDMI and component video, and we were right. What little difference we did notice, we noticed it with that test. In a couple of darker scenes in Gears there seemed to be a little more depth to the blacks (and a bit more distance detail because of it). But to tell you how subtle it was, we didn’t even notice it until we literally started flipping back and forth as fast as we could. Fast motion, spinning, action, all the rest — it looks almost identical on both consoles. When watching an HD DVD in 1080p on HDMI and 1080i on component, we definitely didn’t really notice anything different. The age old question though, right? Is 1080p actually noticeably different? Not to us, and probably not even if you have a 720p set — assuming you’re viewing on anything less than a massive, massive display. By the way, before you make any judgments about perceived visual quality based on our screen caps, please remember that those were taken with a regular camera, not pro screen capturing tools. In other words, what you may think is a big difference in quality may actually just be a small change in light metering or exposure. In other words, you’ll kind of have to take our word for it when we say it looks almost identical. Audio I can now definitely confirm that despite its HDMI output, the Xbox 360 Elite still doesn’t enable advanced codec support (like Dolby TrueHD). You still have the same three options as you had before: digital stereo, Dolby Digital 5. 1, and DD with WMA Pro. When we played back an HD DVD with TrueHD audio (Batman Begins), it just stayed on DD5. 1, nothing else happened. Bummer. But again, that’s what we were expecting. Other minor bits I did notice that the front power button on the Elite console is much quicker than the squishy power button on our classic 360. Probably not enough clikiness to actually justify the purchase in and of itself, we’d imagine. Also, the black controller is entirely matte, whereas the white controller is matte everywhere except the slick silver strip on the bottom. Since that bottom strip is where a couple of your fingers rest when holding the controller we found the entirely matte black controller slightly preferable. I haven’t yet checked out DVD upscaling, but that’s on our list of thing to do. Final thoughts Basically, unless you are seriously eagle-eyed, have a massive screen, or for whatever reason need to use HDMI because you’re all out of component inputs, your investment in the first-gen Xbox 360 is probably safe. Do yourself a favour, just buy that 120GB drive if you need the space, the HDMI really just doesn’t justify replacing your whole console for a new £300 unit. Then again, if you’re truly “elite” then all the stuff we just said really doesn’t matter, and you’re probably going to buy this thing anyway. Cheers enjoy!