Xmas 360!

It’s 8am and man am I tired. I was up at 5:30am yesterday so I could get to the Future Shop and stand in line for a chance at an Xbox 360. I was rewarded for my eagerness with a shiny new “Xbox Three-Shitty” as the Penny Arcade kids call it. The “core” system without hard-drive or wireless controller. I also managed to grab copies of Project Gotham Racing 3 and Call of Duty 2. It was only hours later that I clued-in that the hard-drives weren’t in stores as I expected they would be, forcing me to buy the memory device. I visited 5 or 6 stores before I found one. This offered me an opportunity to ask various people about the relative busy-ness of the stores.

Apparently some stores around Ottawa were more-heavily camped than the one I went to. The St. Laurent Best Buy apparently had a lineup from 3pm the previous day. The Merivale stores had lineups from midnight the previous night. South Keys seemed to be a pretty good choice as it only had 1 girl camped-out over night and a man and a couple of boys with him. Interestingly, the 8-or-so people in line ahead of me were mostly buying Xboxes for friends and family. Apparently the hard-core gamer crowd had all pre-ordered theirs because other than myself, there weren’t many in-line. An interesting thing happened with some of the pre-orders at the Future Shop at South Keys: the people in line got 5 Premium systems that were ear-marked for pre-orders. Three of them went to the chain-smoking middle-aged guy in the blue Taurus (and “neighbors kid” as he repeatedly referred to him). They carted them out of the store like they’d found the Lost Ark of the Covenant. I expect they ended up on Ebay (avg price for a premium system as of last night: ~$2500). A man and his family could live pretty good on that kinda money. Wouldn’t have to work neither!

I shouldn’t begrudge this fellow his Ebay earnings. I should complain about over-sold preorders and a limited supply of hardware creating an artificial surge in demand during a holiday season. The guy in line in front of me was buying his machine for a brother. He worked at a Best Buy, he later told me. He didn’t get a pre-order even though several people at the store had. That’s right, store employees had the option to pre-order and reserve this hardware too, which, I suppose, is ok, since, they, y’know, work there, and stuff…

I’m babbling, and not making much sense. I’m still reeling from playing PGR3 all day yesterday.

One note: the Xbox 360 PC connection utility completely defeated me yesterday. It required a .Net installation, I updated Media Player and repeatedly ran their Media Extender tool and had no success in linking a music library to the 360. Instruction pages were non-instructional. The winning moment was when I plugged in my iPod (actually, I commandeered dria’s for the purpose) and it worked. It worked really well, in-fact!

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