Ok, so I’ve had an Xbox for a couple of weeks now, so I guess its time to let you all know what I think.

Well, firstly, it didn’t come with any games. Apparently there are still some coming – but I’ve had to buy some games initially to make use of it.

Which is a story in itself really. I went to EBGames where they had a sale on. If you bought two 2^nd hand games, you’d get another free.

So I bought myself Lego Star Wars 2 (because the first one rocked on PC), LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth 2 (because I like LOTR and strategy games), and NFS: Most Wanted (because it’s a fun racer).

Now, Most Wanted was the cheapest game, so it should have been free. But instead they rung it up as NFS: Carbon – which was $10 dearer than the LOTR game, which was the one I Should have paid for, and got free instead. So I was $10 down, so I took them back the next weekend to see if I could get it sorted.

Well I think the guy at EB must have been confused, because he ended up giving me a refund for the difference between Most Wanted and Carbon – instead of Carbon and the LOTR game.

So I ended up with more of a refund than I’d expected, but had to spend it there – so I got a Crash Bandicoot game. It’s an original Xbox game, but works on the 360 as well.

And I bought Oblivion on Ebay because I’ve seen other people play it and it looks good.

Ok – so now for the roundup.

Lego Star Wars 2 is great. I only played it for a few hours and finished a lot of levels – so it might not last long, but it’s a blast while it does. And the controls work fine.

Crash Bandicoot is also a heap of fun. Platformers like these work well on consoles.

Unfortunately strategy games don’t.

I haven’t taken the LOTR game back yet, but I’m tempted. I don’t know if it’s just not a very good game, or if its just the console. I should have realized that strategy games without a mouse would really suck – but some people had said that the new LOTR game was a lot better than older console strategy games. I’m just glad I never came across a bad one then.

For those of you who have played Dune II – the first real time strategy game, you’ll remember how clunky the interface was. You had to select a unit (one at a time), then select a command from the side menu (such as move or attack) and then select a destination (or target). This was before you could drag around multiple units or just click to move.

But the thing is – that very clumsy interface is still FAR better than trying to play a modern RTS (real time strategy) game on a console. It just can’t handle it.

Anyway, enough of a rant from me. Just don’t buy a strategy game for a console – you have been warned.

And the last game is Oblivion. This is a really good RPG – or so it seems so far. I haven’t really had much of a chance to give it a proper whirl yet.

But sadly, I miss my mouse here too. And I also really miss the party elements from Baulder’s Gate. And I mean party as in ‘group of travelers’, not as in birthday. In Oblivion it’s just you. In BG it was you plus 4 or 5 other interesting characters who followed you around. Makes all loner RPGs feel a little lame after that.

And the last thing to mention is X-box live.

Yes, I set up an account. But I don’t play online – partly because I don’t have any games where that would be much fun, but mostly cause I don’t have the time.

But I have downloaded a few demos using it – which is why I set it up. It’s been a long time since I bothered with demos for my PC – but for the Xbox they work really well. You just download it, and then play. No installing, no worrying about your system not being up to the task, etc.

And the single best game I’ve demoed so far would have to be Colin McRae Dirt. That’s a fantastic game. Maybe not quite up to the graphics standard of the PS3’s latest GT game – but it’s not bad. WRC, hill-climbs, Dakar, what else could you want?