Well first off, I really ought to digress on why I think the Xbox 360 is cool and to fully appreciate that, we have to take a step back a few years, back to when home video gaming got started. My first experience with home video games was when I was about 5 or 6, my Dad got an Atari 2600, now that brings back memories doesn't it? :) And now that I think about it, that gaming system was probably more for him than it was for me; I mean, he was my age at that time. Ah the good old glory days of Tank, Pong, Breakout and Missile Command. It was a great start to a lifelong addiction to games.

Back in the early to mid-80's I played text based role playing games on an 8088 with no hard drive and dual 5 1/4" floppies before I got into some of the cool graphical games on an old B&W Mac, like shuffleboard and some sort of game where I was a guy in a castle or something. Then I moved up to a 286 and some of the newer PC games that had graphics, I mean who could forget Strip Poker, Leisure Suit Larry and the Police Quest games before things evolved into games like Ultima 1 through the revolutionary Ultima 6, not to mention Duke Nukem and all the other Apogee games. And then I discovered first person shooters, enter Wolfenstien 3D, yeah the old DOS based one. I was in heaven, I loved it, 1st person shooters were definitely my niche and they only got better as I followed one game after another, through the Doom and Quake series and their like to Half Life, Counterstrike and eventually on to modern games like F.E.A.R.

But along the way the continual PC upgrading was just getting ridiculous. I mean, each new generation of games required massive amounts of new hardware, faster processors, newer video cards, more and more memory and hard drive space; and for what? To play video games? Many thousands of dollars got sunk into computer equipment over the years in upgrades and predominantly for gaming purposes. I mean sure, I use the PC for a lot more than just games, I do photo and graphic work along with web stuff, programming and the suite of office tools, but the hardware requirements to do well at those things are far less than that of modern games.

So why do I think the Xbox360 is great? Well it takes a lot of great things and puts them all in one easy to setup simple package that everyone can have access to and enjoy. It makes multiplayer online gaming available to the masses with nothing more required over plug and play. Buying a super tricked out PC just to handle modern games is out of the question. I mean, even modifying one to do so doesn't even make sense. You can get a 360 for $250, that's much less than the cost of a good video card.

With the advent years ago of cheap residential broadband service, PC gamers everywhere suddenly had the ability to get online and play against people all over the place without leaving the comfort of their computer room. Gone were the glory days of the LAN party and with the online gaming system Xbox Live, now console players can get in on the action. I've been playing online gaming for many years and I have many friends that just didn't do the PC thing, but LIVE brings it to the masses. On top of that, the performance/graphics letdown factor doesn't exist with the 360. WYSIWYG. Remember when word processing was like coding HTML, remember what a big deal that was switching from character based word processors to graphical ones, well I think of it in the same way. On a PC, sometimes even with the required equipment, you don't always get the same graphics on the box, but with the 360, what you see is what you get.

Which brings me to the Xbox Live Vision cam. So aside from porn, video chat never really took off. I mean, it seemed like a good idea, but even with the ability so smoothly stream video and have uninterrupted audio, people generally just seem to prefer audio for conversations even when the video option is there. I don't know why, just seems to be the case. But it does have some other cool features, for one thing you can also hook this thing up to your pc to record videos for whatever it is you feel like or snap quick pictures, while on your 360 you can use it to snap pictures you can include in messages to friends. You've got the ability to leave a message for someone in the system, kind of like in the Thirteenth Floor with text, audio and a picture, too cool.

But the really cool part is the face mapping. After taking a few pictures of yourself some games will render your image, then map you to a custom character in the game. Between that and having your own voice in the game, you've got a nearly creepy level of realism and you can share that with your friends. Now that is cool.