blog/xbox360_logo.jpgBraving the crazed Black Friday shoppers, I popped into Target to check out Xbox 360 product. No units to be had, however you could get any of the games, controllers, memory cards, etc., although without having the Xbox it’s sorta pointless.

I watched a young surf kid with an afro and wearing a Boy Scouts shirt play King Kong. The graphics were pretty damned impressive. As good or better than any PC I’ve seen touting the latest $400 card from ATI or nVidia. Lest you not forget the Xbox 360 comes complete for $400.

So what’s the tech media got up their arse about waiting for “the next best thing” when it’s clearly arrived?

It seems every console platform is compared against the PC for its gaming prowess. It’s got to have ball-busting graphics, a fast CPU, wireless this-and-that for multiplayer gaming, industry-standard USB ports, HD TV support, etc. And someone will still complain that PC gaming is better.

I’ve never dropped four bills for the latest video card because it’s not that simple. You undoubtedly will also need a new system board, latest CPU (overclocked and watercooled), with SATA drives setup in RAID-5. I mean, geez, NASA doesn’t use that much juice in their Mars rovers (which, by the way, use a sub-1 GHz PowerPC processor). So maybe I don’t know how awesome PC gaming might be at that level, but it seems hardly worth the expense.

I don’t know why the media is so-so on the Xbox and why they seem hell bent on the PS3 as the Second Coming, but the 360 will do the trick for 90% of the gamers wanting an awesome new console. What about the other 10%? They’ll buy a PS3 too and drop another $1000 on their PC because they’re young enough not to start saving for retirement.

The latest eCost flyer listed the Xbox 360 at $400 with a maxed-out “gaming” PC rig at $2500. You could buy all three of the new consoles and spend less dough than an obsolete-in-six-months $2500 piece of Windows-running junk.

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