That's pretty funny. Croakenstein maybe?

You could name him Chet.

Looks like a Byron McFrogwarts, Esq. to me.

Do you have any frog-sized top hats? Or perhaps a small frog monocle?

That's just too awesome Puce, the little green bastard put zing in this post. Grats, and make sure you add every Goodger you can on Xbox Live!

CONFORMED!

I know you've just tried Gears on the PC, but once the sour taste wears off you should at least rent it for the 360 and go through cooperatively. The elements that make it a good entry game into console shooters would make it a poor PC shooter, I imagine. I just killed a lot of people tonight without a reticule, and that made all the difference.

I plan on it. My brother bought it and so it's kind of "included" with the system, along with some other shovelware that he was dumb enough to get. (Including some sonic game that is hitting the used bin at EB hard.) In fact, the only way I feel gipped in this deal is that I'm passing him the cream of the crop of Wii games to go with the system and he's leaving me with pretty much just gears. Ah well, spreading gaming in the family is well worth it - I hope his girlfriend gets more enjoyment out of the Wii than mine did.

I've spent a bit of time with the new console. Loads of fun. ^.^ Thanks for all of the welcomes! Here's my brief initial impressions of the stuff I've played with so far, just in case anyone else is curious about the stuff that comes with the arcade version.

Pac-Man Championship Edition
- small graphical tweaks to the Pac-Man formula, and the game seems to control well. However, I couldn't seem to find a way to play just 'regular' Pac-Man - it seems to be just time-attack modes (which I've always hated) - play for five minutes or 10 minutes and see how high a score you can get. Blah. I've always liked the feeling of satisfaction from the original Pac-Man when you finally munch that last dot and clear the level. Maybe it's something you can unlock if you play it long enough.

Feeding Frenzy
Very simple, and kind of fun. I ended up playing this one for about 30 minutes. The fish are amusing and I like the little factoids they present between levels. Plus, it has the barest semblance of a story/progression arc, which is nice.

Boom Boom Rocket
Lots of fun! The girlfriend and I played through all of the songs on medium difficulty. Getting the 'bonus 16x' really makes you feel like you've accomplished something.

Uno
Haven't tried this one yet.

Luxor 2
Attractive, easy controls, and a nice adventure mode. Not really my kind of game though; I played through one level then quit. I might pick it back up in the future.

Viva Pinata
Not sure how this happened, but the demo was ready to play within about 30 minutes of hooking it up to my router. Considering that my download speed tops out at 17kb/sec, I guess it must have been pre-installed on the disc. Holy Cow! This is one pretty game. Kind of a Sim-City light with the adorability ramped up to 11. I think we ended up playing this one for at least an hour, until a syrupent decided it wanted to eat my pinatas. I whacked it with a shovel a couple of times, and it fell down and remained motioinless with 'turd fumes' coming out of its body. I walled it off with fences so the stink from its decomposing corpse wouldn't nauseate my remaining pinatas.

Culdcept Saga
Oh yes! The ol' Culdcept vibe hit hard and fast. I was very impressed with the backgrounds and some of the card art/animations. Great fun, though it looks like they have not veered more than a centimeter off of the path the original culdcept travelled, based on the bit that I played. That's okay, though - more of the same is fine in my book for a title that I enjoyed so much! I won my first match by a narrow margin. Good fight!

I was mainly just curious about the different display modes. My TV (a panasonic tau 32 inch) won't do 720p, only the 1080i, which puzzled me. I though that any set that could do 1080i could do 720p, but perhaps not.

Well, the vodka has settled in nicely, and it may be time to play another round in the story-mode of Culdcept.

Oh! I do not know if I will do much on Live; single-player has always been my original love, and will likely stay so. However, I did set up my Live silver membership, and I kept my username from my Halo 1 PC gaming server.

aFifthofGin is my Live handle! Perhaps I'll see some of you on there at some point, if any are playing Culdcept.

one of the best part about owning a 360 is the endless amount of free play you can get from demos. Really changes the practical math.

I've been enjoying the 360 quite a bit. I had a slight mishap where I accidentally erased about two hours of progress in Culdcept Saga trying to make a new save game for my girlfriend. Apparently you have to make a new 'profile', yikes! Once we got that straightened out it worked fine. I'm a little concerned that I can't create a 'backup' of a save game in a different slot for this game - being a long term RPG player I've always alternated between several save states.

Question about the 360 - can you use any external drive / flash drive to store game data/downloads? I have a USB-to-IDE/SATA adapter and an unused 80GB SATA hard drive. Can I use this with the 360? I have the feeling that there's *some* sort of trick not letting you do this, otherwise why would anyone pay $70+ bucks for a piddly 20 gig drive? Thanks for any information!

Also, my 360 likes to 'roar' periodically. I assume it's those 60 (80?) mm fans revving up, but man, it's loud. Does anyone know if this is done on a timing cycle, or is there a temperature sensor that controls this? It seems kind of random, because I played Culdcept for about an hour with the 360 roaring the whole time. I got irritated and unplugged the 360. When I plugged it back in and reloaded the same game, it didn't roar at all, even though I played for about 45 minutes. Is there any kind of software fan control?

And how! I just downloaded the Aegis Wing 'demo' (looks like it's the full game.) Though it took me nearly an hour to get the thing (slow connection here) I've had a blast with it. I've also enjoyed N+

Oh! And I saw that one of the 'featured demo download' games was Worms. Does anyone know if this is the awesome 2D (world party, armageddon) worms, or the cruddy (at least the bit that I played) 3D worms?

That's the exact TV I had (and Logan has now).

The Panasonic could do 1080i and not 720p because CRTs are not progressive scan devices. So all you'll get on a CRT is 1080i.

If it's like any other device (my 360 is an older, non-HDMI version), you just tell it in the sound settings to output over optical instead of HDMI. That's if it doesn't do so automatically. My PS3 and DirecTV HD DVR both pass video over HDMI and audio over optical.

Evil Avatar thread on this topic

Apparently MS makes an audio adapter dongle that is included with their HDMI cable package.

Like Legion mentioned, my Elite came with both an HDMI cable and a dongle that goes in the standard port for optical sound.

Hey watch it!

Another question for any 360 owners: The ring of light on my controller likes to spin round n' round, perpetually blinking the green lights (blinking 1 & 4, then 2 & 3, then repeat, etc.) Is this normal, or is it likely that my controller is having trouble 'talking' to my system? I've not had any trouble with it disconnecting/losing button presses, so maybe it's just perpetually scanning for new controllers.