I’ve finally broken down and purchased an Xbox. Circuit City had it combined with the DVD playback kit ($30 value) for $149.99, which seemed to be a good enough deal to fork over the money. I must say… it is REALLY nice. Microsoft has done an exceptional job at building, marketing, and “convincing” game-makers to adopt the wee beastie. The UI of the machine is very well thought-out, intuitive, and smooth.

I’ve ordered some PS2->Xbox converters from liksang.com so that I can use my custom-built arcade controllers with the xbox.

I’ve purchased 3 games for the xbox thus far: splinter cell (the first one), the two towers, and capcom versus snk.

And, I’ve had tons of fun with the xbox and my family thus far. Lynn and the kiddos have spent literally hours watching me play through splinter cell, even though Lynn and Ash and Jason complain that it makes them nauseous. =:) And the kids are just itching for me to let them play the two towers. And we’ve probably sunk a good couple of hours into playing capcom vs. snk.

See? Good clean fun.

Oh–also, I’ve taken back the $45 crappy GeForce MX 4000 video card to Media Play, and was all set to spend another $150 or so on a video card, but have decided to wait. As it is, I’m thinking that I can just insist that if there are games the kiddos want to buy and play, they will have to buy and play them on/for the Xbox. This is all well and good until the kids (or me) find a game (Enter the Matrix, for example) that is only for (or cheaper for) the PC. Then I’ll have to agonize over which card to get again.

But for the time being, I’m pretty impressed with the Xbox. And it’s not like I have tons of time to sink into playing games anyway. =:)