I love my Wii, but there are a few games for the XBox I would like to play and the Arcade version is only $200.
Will I be f-ed in the a if I buy one this late in the cycle? Do you think that they will discontinue producing these and move on to the next generation soon? Are there rumblings of another price drop?
What say you?
I’ve only had my 360 for about 9 months and I’m quite happy with the purchase. The advantage of buying late is there are a ton of proven games available at discount prices. I went the GameFly route at first and then bought the games I liked for under $20 a piece, some of them less than $10.
Obviously it’s not terribly important for you to be the first to own the latest and greatest, so if you have the $200 to spare I say go for it.
I don’t think they’ve even announced intentions for the next console yet, have they? The 360, Wii, and PS3 are the dominant consoles now and will likely be so until Christmas 2011, unless breaking news comes out this summer about something being released this year. But I doubt it; Microsoft’s and Sony’s profits tend to live on hype, and I would expect a new console to be announced at least a year before it’s ready.
Even if that were the case, there is a huge library for the 360 and a lot of very good games for it. Even if they stopped making any new games now, you could definitely get your money’s worth out of what’s available now. It’s not like you have to trash your existing console when a new one comes out.
I think it’s actually a good time to buy one. I just bought mine a couple months ago and I’ve been having a blast with it. There are tons of old games to catch up on (and a lot of them are cheap now, too) and still more coming out. Off the top of my head I’m really looking forward to Red Dead Redemption, Dead Rising 2, Alan Wake, and Fallout: New Vegas, all due out this year.
I would recommend getting the Elite instead of the Arcade. I think I’d be frustrated with the experience if I didn’t have the hard drive. Right now it also comes bundled with Halo: ODST, which is kinda mediocre but still worth playing, and Forza 3, which is awesome. I wish I’d waited for this bundle, mine came with Lego Batman and PURE. :rolleyes:
Shop around - you can find the Arcade version for $160 without much effort.
and a 120GB HD for well less than the $130 MSRP.
Absolutely, buy an XBox 360 - it’s a great console. I’m particularly fond of the Bioshock and Mass Effect games. Dead Space is another great game - it doesn’t get the hype of Bioware’s stuff, but it’s cheap, gorgeous, and utterly terrifying zombies-in-space fun.
Unless you haven’t an HDTV, I think the Xbox 360 is a lot of fun.
BTW, I agree with the posters who point out that you should really get a model with a hard drive. Not only because it’ll let you save games more easily, but it’s the best way to get demos, XBox Arcade games, and so on. If you insist on the Arcade, though, don’t waste your money on the official memory cards. The latest firmware update supports generic USB memory sticks.
ETA: Forgot to mention Dragon Age. Get Dragon Age! In fact, rule of thumb: If Bioware makes it, buy it. Seriously - no need for reviews, just hand them your credit card.
I think the 360 and the PS3 will be around for a while. They are both powerful and probably haven’t been pushed to their limits yet. And I don’t think either are eager to make a faster/ higher power/ better graphics machine with a bigger price tag since it seemed to backfire a bit on Sony.
The only think I could imagine being on the horizon would be a Wii 2.0 with a boost in graphic power (1080p HD games).
Project Natal is allegedly coming out for the Xbox 360 for this upcoming Christmas. It’s a handsfree camera that will track motions and translate them to the game. Microsoft had said that it will be completely compatible with the 360 (thus extending its life a couple years if successful).
Thanks for all the advice. I don’t generally have a lot of time for heavy duty gaming - just a couple hours a week and even that’s spotty. Do you think I still need the hard drive? I probably won’t do a lot of online gaming, but am interested in the DLC for GTAIV.
Also - I was thinking of picking it up at Target or Gamestop or Amazon or something. Where are these cheaper deals to be had?
Yes, I think you should still get the hard drive. It’s not so much for online gaming as for DLC - not only add-ons, but free demos for new games. It’s absolutely worth the extra money.
Also, you can install games to your hard drive - you’ll still need the disk in the drive, but it won’t need to spin constantly. This should, in theory, improve both performance and the life-expectancy of your system.
Amazon and Target are both decent places to get an xbox. If you’re not in a hurry, you could spend a couple weeks checking for bundle deals on Gizmodo or Engadget or something - there’s usually someone selling a discounted xbox bundle.
I don’t recommend buying from Gamestop. They aren’t terrible, but I generally find their staff can’t answer questions along the lines of “What cable do I need?”, and they’re more zealous enforcers of their chains’ ID-checking policy than most. At 26, I find it annoying to have to show my license to a high-school kid to buy a video game.
It’s a fine time to pick up a 360 - I’m honestly a big fan of waiting until about this point in the console life cycle before buying in. It gives you a far better picture of whether the console will actually entertain you than buying at launch does, and you inevitably get more stuff for your buck.
As has already been mentioned, none of the major console manufacturers have shown any sign of wanting to move to a new generation of hardware - the Wii is thriving, Sony is still smarting from the PS3 release (Going from crushing dominance in the PS2 era to third place this time out.), and Microsoft has been waving their hands and blowing their horns for Natal. All three companies have denied any interest in moving to a new generation of hardware, and, truthfully, there’s not a lot of reason why they should.
That said, I do agree with everyone here - get a hard drive. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly big one - you can probably even get away with a 20GB one if all you want to do is play games, though I personally suggest at least a 60. It’s not for Online play practically at all - indeed, I can’t really think of any games with Online play that would require a hard drive to do it. What it’s for is downloadable content, and, even moreso, Xbox Live Arcade games. There’s a lot of bloody terrific stuff available on XBLA, sometimes for absurdly bargain prices and pretty much all of it for $15 or less, but all those cool downloaded games need to go somewhere, and a memory card isn’t really going to cut it. THAT said, they DID just patch in support for using USB devices for this sort of thing, with the caveat that there’s an arbitrary 16GB limit. So if you have a USB hard drive, or have/are willing drop $30 on a USB memory stick you’d like to use, that could be a cheaper route until you determine if you want to pay actual money for a MS branded hard drive (which, make no mistake, are price gouging - a 250GB XBox hard drive costs about as much as 1 TB SATA drive.).
Get a 20 GB harddrive off of ebay. It’ll be all you need. Beyond that, you can extend your storage via USB. As for deals, Dell usually has a deal going. I don’t have any problems buying from Gamestop - you’ll get a good deal, and everything you want is in the store.
Microsoft has mentioned that the Xbox 720 (my own pet name for the console) is on the drawing board. But that’s been no hint that it’s any closer than Late 2011 at the earliest (and I think even that is pushing it).
So now’s a great time to get an Xbox 360.
It’s likely that there won’t be a true new gen of consoles for at least 2 years, I’m betting 3. Some will see improvements in manufacturing process which will make them cheaper to build, and you’ll see some more of the silly motion control schemes that are all the rage right now. I really think you should be safe with your purchase for a while yet.
As an aside, if you have a desktop that is less than about 4 years old, a $100 graphics card + steam is all you need to enjoy many of the same games available on the consoles (plus heaps more). just FYI 
Just going to second or third all of this.
**Buy it. **
I was on the fence on buying an Ipod. I used up the battery the first day I got it. The 360 does sooo much, it felt to me like the day I bought the Ipod all over again. Thankfully, I have yet to RROD it. It’s amazing all it can do. Can I stress that enough?
NATAL will work with 360, so I don’t think that you have to worry until Holiday 2012 at the earliest.
I got my Wii a month after launch [Was 21st in line for 20 night of launch] and I know exactly how the OP feels. Nintendo fanboys can only wait so long until something has to give.
Got my 360 back in October. I’ve unplugged my PS2 and my Wii only sees action from Bit Trip Beat and Boom Blox.
**Spring for the Elite if you can. [/B ]I got Lego Batman and Pure (two full games) packed in with it, and the headset. My cousin got the Arcade, and I could hear it in his voice, when he asked me if I got the Elite or not. The price of admission is less, but I think the savings are there if you can go in for more at the start.
I don’t know why everyone’s ragging on the Arcade. I bought mine pretty much right when it came out and guess what? I’ve never had a RRoD.
I play it in a room and don’t have it connected to the internet and have never really needed a hard drive. I did end up buying a 20GB HD because I was having a problem with a disc and loaded it up to the HD and it would play fine from that. But it was only one game that had the problem (Beatles Rock Band).
The arcade is fine if you’re not into the Live scene.
I have all three. The Wii has been relegated to the guest bedroom to keep the kids entertained. I use the 360 for Bioshock 2 and Forza Motorsport 3, but mostly Netflix. The PS3 is used for Dead Space and occasionally Little Big Planet.
I’m planning on letting my XBox live Gold subscription lapse now that netflix has come to the PS3.
get it, use it, love it…and go buy up a TON of used games. Halo 2, Forza Motorsport 2, Bioshock…I have Fallout 3 on my list. There’s a TON of excellent stuff out there, even if they never released a new game.
Cite? Last I heard, they had denied that there was any “720” in the works.
Not that it matters. I cannot stress this enough. Even if Microsoft released a new console TOMORROW, it would -still- be a very good time to buy a 360 (or, for that matter, a PS3, but that’s not really the discussion topic at hand.). The fact is that there’s a large and still rapidly growing library of very good software for it. It’s officially at the point where there’s something new (or sometimes old) that I want to get for it every month - and I’m not even INTO the the FPS market that comprises the primary genre on the box.
stpauler no one is “ragging” on the arcade, nor suggesting that in some way it’s any more or less likely to experience technical difficulties. All I personally am saying is that I have more than 2GB (the size of the largest Xbox 360 memory card I’m aware of) in Xbox Live Arcade games alone (Humorous, that the ‘Arcade’ version of the system should be the worst one in the lineup for playing games from the ‘Arcade’ part of the service…). Heck, I think Shadow Complex is 2GB by itself. That’s excluding any demos, indie games, saved game data, downloadable content, this, that, or the other.
Now, with the ability to use generic USB devices up to 16GB, the Arcade becomes significantly more viable - the more I think about it, the wiser I think that solution is for someone testing the waters - but I don’t think there’s any question that you’re not getting maximum fun out of your 360 without having more than 2GB of storage to kick around.
Nothing recent, but plugging “Xbox 720” into Google will give you dozens of sites where MS execs say “Of course we’re working on it, but it’s really far away, and we have nothing official to announce.”