So, I've had the XBox 360 for less than 24 hours now and so far I'm really loving it. Here are my thoughts in no particular order...

I love the Dashboard. In fact, I spent my first two hours not playing games but simply looking around and browsing my media. I love the fact that I can view my digital photos from my PC. I love the fact that I have access to my 80 gig MP3 collection. (Question - for games with custom soundtracks, do you have to copy the mp3 to the xbox to use it? Can you even copy tracks?) I especially loved watching video via MediaCenter. Most of my videos were not in the right format for MediaCenter - but the ones that were streamed without any problems. Very - very cool. I know that there are tools out there already that give you access to your media on your TV - but having it integrated with my console and dvd player is just darn perfect. I also loved that I could download game demos and trailers. I'm going to have to watch out to make sure I don't fill up the drive.

So after about two hours of playing around - I finally put in a game - Call of Duty 2. I had played a bit of COD2 on my PC. Now - not to brag - but my PC is pretty good. It is a dual core with 2 gigs of RAM and a high end video card. It runs really fast. So imagine my surprise when COD2 looked better than the PC version! I've never seen a console game display better than a PC game. I simply cannot describe how well it looked - and I don't even have HD. (Although I do have a nice 36 inch Sony WEGA.) The load times were about ten times faster than the PC version. I even played a bit online (and got my butt kicked) and it was as fun as I imagined it.

So I know it is nearly impossible to get a 360 - but as a gamer I can definitely highly recommend it.