I played an Xbox for the first time yesterday

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I never got into Xbox, PlayStation, et al. When I wanted to play a game, I’d play one of the Tomb Raider series, or else Red Baron, on the computer. (Incidentally, I now get an ‘illegal error’ when I try to run any of the Tomb Raider games. I don’t know why.)

I went down to the studio yesterday to transfer some film for a customer. Short job. We ended up playing Halo on the Xbox. Of course I got plastered. I think I was killed four out of ever five ‘resurrections’ in the game. Not surprising. I’d never played a split-screen game, the controls were counterintuitive (push the stick forward to look up, pull it back to look down – I finally figured out how to reverse it), and my friend has spend untold hours playing Xbox games. After a while we found the cooperative game. Nice, not having the more advanced player kill you all the time, but it was nearly impossible to tell the good guys from the bad guys.

But it was very addictive.

2

You picked a good game to dive into the Xbox world with. I have spent countless hours blowing up friends and enemies alike playing Halo.

3

Assuming you keep playing, you’ll adjust to that.

4

I checked out Amazon.com, and they say the Xbox is not available. IIRC (I checked last night, and I was tired) they had a reconditioned one for $10 less than retail on a new one. (ISTR that there was a used one for over $200.)

MSRP is $149. Are retailers selling them for more than that? Are Xboxes ‘hard to get’? I mean, it was a fun game; but not so much that I’d go out of my way to get one.

5

Not at all. Drop by a Gamestop (or EB Games or Babbages or whatever they call it near you) and ask about a used system. They usually have them for around $120 used.

6

You probably saw some special bundle package on Amazon, which is no longer available. Example, this past Christmas season, you could get the XBox with two games (on one disc) included free (which is when I bought mine, as I coincidentally was going to buy both games separately anyway). The standard is the XBox itself, one controller, and the necessary power and AV Cables, no games, $150. Plenty in stock at your local Best Buy / Circuit City / Gamestop / Target / whatever. Again, the used for $200+ I’d guess to be somebody throwing in a few games.

7

The bad guys are the ones shooting at you: if they’re Covenant aliens, pick up a discarded energy weapon from one of your kills - they have better firearms and vehicles {your Warthog sucks; their Banshee is brilliant}, although you can’t recharge them, so you need to keep scavenging the battlefield for more.

The Flood zombies are more vulnerable to projectile weapons, so pick up a shotgun and get fraggin’. The Flood are actually harder to fight, since the Covenant have pretty good AI and will lurk behind cover, whereas the Flood will just swamp you in a horde. Oh, and don’t be shy about letting the Marines take the strain - that’s what they’re paid for.

It’s a fantastic game: they cut back all the boring platform climbing and switch pulling to concentrate on the basics of combat, without making it a Doom-a-like gib fest - you really do need to concentrate on your battlefield tactics rather than just blasting everything in sight, and being limited to only two weapons at a time adds that extra edge.