It's been a while

Wow, it’s been ages since I contributed anything to the blog. The irony is, when lots of stuff’s been going on in my life I don’t tend to have the time to blog it all. That said, I get the feeling that making time to blog it will be beneficial. Once I’ve written about it I’m sure I’ll be able to think more clearly.

So, the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy and pretty important. Well, some things weren’t al; that pivotal, but I’ll talk about them over the next few posts anyway. I’ll try to keep it vaguely chronological, but it’s mostly divided into topics. I’ll start with something frivolous.

A few weeks ago I visited a friend in Essex to, at his request, check out his Xbox 360. To be honest, it seems just like the original Xbox, only instead of being a big black box it’s now a slightly svelter white box with an external power supply unit that is, quite literally, the size of a brick. Apparently it’ll also break after a year (if anecdotal evidence is to be believed) so it’s also far more fragile. I’ve had my Xbox for a few years now, and the worst thing that’s happened is that it’s developed a slight, asthmatic wheeze when first started up. It goes away after a minute or so and then continues to operate completely normally.

None of the games look an awful lot better than regular Xbox games. Of course the reason for this is quite obvious. Whilst my friend had a new, ultra modern, ultra powerful Xbox 360 he had it hooked up to a decidedly un-modern CRT, non-HD TV, meaning that every single game was displayed in a resolution well below that which was intended. Any graphical fanciness was completely lost on the blurry old SD TV. In actual fact, the images were so un-sharp that I actually started feeling a little wonky just trying to play a game of gears of war. I don’t suppose this was helped by the fact that I had to play split screen, thus halving the screen size and effectively reducing the already woefully inadequate display resolution. It’s no wonder I had to stop. My eyes were really going funny and my head was beginning to hurt. It was becoming abundantly obvious that I was right all along about the Xbox 360. There’s no point in getting one if you don’t have an HDTV.

Oddly enough, as a result of the televisual shortcomings, all the new games held little appeal for me and I ended up spending most of my time playing Halo 2. Of course, none of the alleged enhancement made to Halo 2 for playback on the 360 were apparent because, you’ve guessed it, it wasn’t connected to an HDTV. It therefore looked exactly the same as it did on my near 5 year old Xbox. Since Halo and its many sequels are the only games I’ll probably end up playing on the 360 it really does render the purchase of a 360 completely pointless. Of course I’ll probably change my mind when I get my own, personal 360 and Halo 3 comes out, but for now, even if I had the money (which I don’t), I wouldn’t buy one. Besides, there’s supposed to be a new version coming out soon that’s black and has an HDMI port enabling it to be connected to an HDTV in a purely digital way as opposed to the many pronged analogue component approach favoured by the current model. Perhaps it won’t break down so quickly either. Of course all this is only a rumour, but I’m certainly prepared to wait and see if it’s true.

Besides, I really have stopped playing a lot of video games (though, inevitably, I’ve ended up playing Halo on the PC far too much) owing to the cancellation of my Xbox Live account, thus preventing me from playing Xbox games online and saving me up to £40 a year. I must stop playing Halo because it stops me from pursuing more worthwhile activities like writing and applying for jobs. Which neatly brings me to my next subject.