More Xbox 360 Stuff

So I mentioned that the cables provided weren’t long enough. Did they really think 2ft of cable between component input and composite audio input would be enough. So I only had 2 options at this point, which was to buy extension cables for the audio cables or get a optical audio cable. If you look closely at the connector that plugs into the Xbox 360, you’ll see a little hole where you can stick in an optical audio cable. I thought I might as well invest in an optical audio cable, since I have plenty of composite audio cable connects back home in LA.

So I search online for a bit and most places were selling the cable for $10 or more shipped. I did end up finding this at Amazon.com: StarTech.com 10FT THIN TOSLINK DIGITAL ( THINTOS10 ). Buy.com is also selling it for $5.99. Both have free shipping over $25, but I’m on the Prime trial for Amazon.com and 2-day shipping is free. Plus I somehow have a $10 GC in my Amazon.com account, so the choice was pretty obvious. Who knows, maybe I could’ve gotten it cheaper locally, but I’m too lazy like that.

Stanman came by today and we played hours of Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark Zero.

PGR3 is realistic, but I never really found realistic racing games to be all that much fun. We did get a lot better and actually changed the opponent’s skill level from Novice to Easy to Medium (you’d think easy would be below novice) and also ended up giving them Class C cars (we drove Class B cars). I personally had a hard time controll Class A cars and kept crashing into the wall.

Afterwards, I showed him the demo of Ridge Racer 6. That racing game I think is a lot more fun, with the easier control and drifting abilities. I also showed him how fun Geometry War was, though I’m still trying to find cheap points to purchase to get the full game.

We finally played a couple hours of Perfect Dark Zero as we tried out all the different weapons. We started off fighting Agent bots, but near the end, upgraded them to Secret Agent bots. The control takes a bit to figure out and it got qutie annoying because I’d always tap by left joystick and that means to crouch. It’s also hard to tell if you’re crouching or not until you realize you’re moving really slow.

So one question I wanted to find out was what the difference between Xbox Live Gold and Xbox Live Silver was. The Silver subscription is free, and I forget how much the Gold subscription is, but it’s not free. I went with Silver, but it automatically gave me a month trial of Gold (which would automatically degrade to Silver after a month, unless I explicitly tell them I want to subscribe). From this FAQ:

Q. What is Xbox Lvie Silver?

A. Xbox Live Silver is a free version of the Xbox Live service. The main difference between the Gold and Silver levels of service is that you can’t play online multiplayer games with Xbox Live Silver. You can still download content from the Xbox Live Marketplace, download games in the Xbox Live Arcade, and keep a friends list so you can chat and share your gamer profile and achievements.

So it turns out the only difference is you can play multiplayer online. I really doubt I’d do that much as I’m not really a online gamer type nor play games online much. The only time I play multiplayer is probably when I go over to a friend’s house or they come to mine. Looks like I can still download updates, demos, arcade games, and videos and basically anything from their marketplace with my Silver account.

The ability to download demos for the Xbox 360 is pretty awesome. So far I’ve gotten Ridge Racer 6, Full Auto, and Top Spin 2. Each demo is like 700megs and you only have 20GB of space. For some reason, it’s reporting I only have 10GB free now. I think I started with 14GB, but even if I use 20,000,000,000 bytes, I should still be at 18.6GB. I wonder what intially took up that much space. It did come with some videos and the Hexic game, but I doubt that took up 4GB itself. My user profile’s also there, but once again, this is a missing 4GB. There were no demos preloaded into the Xbox 360 that I can recall.