FoxBoom!

So, I was out shopping this morning, and I noticed Virgin had a special offer bundle on the Xbox 360 Elite and Bioshock. When I got home, I mentioned the offer to Spirit and he asked me why I didn’t buy one.

I had no good answer. I went back and bought one.

Now, this Xbox is only my second plug-into-TV console, the first being an Amiga CD32. Beyond that, I’ve only ever owned a GBA, GBA SP, DS and a PSP (which I traded in for the DS, due to being pants). Bear all of this in mind when you imagine my brain trying to comprehend how FUCKING GOOD Bioshock looks in 40″ of HD.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help the fact that I suck pretty badly at FPSes.

But heck, after having an afternoon to play around with the thing, I think it’s going to be almost permanently used to host my DVD collection. I’m in the process of ripping my library to H.264, which will be dumped onto a USB hard disk and played back from the 360. I’ve just tried it with a video I put together of last weekend’s party, and it looks stunning. I reviewed the footage last weekend on my Mac via the TV, but it wasn’t running at native 1080i resolution; it looked good, but not great. The 360 runs at real 1080i, and the difference is incredible. The first ripped DVD test will occur in about an hour, when Star Wars Episode 4: A New Hope is done. That’s assuming my MacBook Pro hasn’t burned through my jeans and cut my legs off before then.

But hey, my Xbox Live gamertag is “Howl the Fox”. See you out there!

UPDATE: As of the end of November, my XBox LIVE Gamertag has changed to “FoxBoom”.