360 Kiosks at Walmart
Well I got the chance to play the Xbox 360 for a little while at Walmart today. They were setting it up while I was doing some shopping, so I stuck around a few extra minutes to try it out.
My first impression is that the 360 seems pretty much the same as a high-end PC as far as graphics go. There was a significant amount of jagginess in the games I played, but I suspect this was due to either the resolution being set too low for the HDTV (it may have been outputting 480i instead of 720p, etc) or the fact that these were all demos that, from their descriptions, seem to be the same as those shown at E3 a long time ago. With the 360’s power, I expect that the final games should have no jaggies whatsoever, and what I saw was just way too jaggy to be for real (my old N64 was smoother than this). Anyways, aside from the jaggies the games looked very good. I played Kameo, Call of Duty 2, and King Kong, and while there was nothing that I don’t think a new PC could handle, the textures, detail, and lighting were all very nice. I think what I liked best about the 360 was actually the controller. It felt great, easily more comfortable and intuitive than my Dual Shock 2. I’m still left feeling as though I haven’t really experienced the system, due to the evil jaggy lines that seemed to cover the edge of every polygon, but there’s no doubt that the 360 is a significant jump up from the current consoles. Plus, the ability to wirelessly network with your computer is just cool ^_^.
