I bought my first gaming console, Xbox 360, two months back. Though I am not a big gamer, I always loved to design levels and develop simple games (no Unreal or Doom4 from me!). I bought the Xbox360 from Kempfort (now called Kempkids) in Airport road. I got the premium pack. There was a huge price difference between the core system and the premium system, but I preferred the premium as it comes with lots of accessories, which when put together with the core system’s price exceeded the price I paid for the premium. Not bad, eh? The Xbox 360 market price in US is around $400, which is roughly 18,000/- INR. Why then I was asked to pay another 7 – 8K for a premium system, is still a mystery to me.
The premium system doesn’t ship with any game. I was aware of this, even then I didn’t buy any games. First thing – it is pretty costly again – 2500/- per title is kind of expensive for a game. Next thing is, that day I wanted only to check out the interface and if possible connect my PC to the Xbox 360. So, I was not that keen on buying a game that day itself.
The setup woes started the moment I opened the box. Microsoft has “cleverly” decided to ship Xbox360 (from now on, just Xbox) with a 16A plug. What?? Don’t they know that the only places where we use a 16amp socket in India is either in the bathroom or in the kitchen? After a frantic search in the near by electrical shops, I found a 16A extension box – another Rs. 500/- dent in the pocket. Next I noticed that the component cable was missing in the Xbox package. I called up Kempfort and talked to the manager there. Unfortunately he was not aware of what I was asking for. I called up the next day to talk to the MS representative and he said it didn’t come by default but MS had asked them to provide the component cable separately. So, if you are buying Xbox 360 in India and find no component cable, do call up the place where you bought from and ask them. You get a RCA cable free 
I used the RCA cable initially and then switched immediately to the component cable to test out my HD LCD TV (R71b). The Xbox user interface was smooth, check out the screen shots here. I setup a profile quickly and started exploring the menu options. In 720p, it was simply a visual treat switching using this interface!
I didn’t buy the wireless bridge for Xbox, so I was stuck with connecting a looong wire from my study room router to the Xbox in the living room. Xbox configured itself with out any hitch and, voila, I was on Xbox Live! It asked me to install some patches – actually threatened me to install it immediately or else I would be kicked off Live…Woah, very subtle! I installed all it asked me to. I installed TVersity in my PC and from Xbox I connected to my PC. Great. I could browse through my photo collection and videos and could even stream them seamlessly. Only hiccup was that my PC was very old (a P4 with out HT) and was not able to handle DivX transcoding.
Two days after that, I bought Gears of War and later PGR3 from Hyderabad. I will talk about them in a different post.
Tags: bangalore, Console games, Game-Consoles, microsoft, Xbox 360
