XBox 360 Tuesday

I reserved an XBox 360 at a local EBX back in late May. At the time I started bugging my videogame fanatic friend Scott to do the same, and he pre-ordered in early June. Another coworker who likes her gaming pre-ordered in September.

This last week, after hearing that many pre-orders would go unfulfilled on its debut, I wanted to make sure I was all set to go. I figured I was all set, but it can't hurt to check. I called the EB, and after brushing off the canned "We'll call those getting one soon" response, I got the salesguy to check. He did, and I was indeed all set to go. Same for Scott. (It actually turned out I was 10th on their list.)

Later that week our other co-worker checked, and she will not be getting one on opening day. (But, she's having a blast with Half-Life 2 on the XBox, so it's not a tragedy by any means, because that is such a superb game.)

I've already pre-ordered and received my first two games: Kameo and Condemned. Scott pre-ordered Project Gotham Racing 3 and Perfect Dark:Zero. We deliberately made sure we don't have any overlap so we can swap games when done, at least for trying the others out for a few days.

The one (admittedly minor) hitch is that our EBX that we pre-ordered from will not be opening at midnight, but instead wait until 8am the next morning. They were originally saying they'd open at midnight, but now were saying they received fewer 360s Microsoft initially said they would get, and it was no longer worth it to open early. Fortunately I took that Tuesday off, so it's only a minor delay, and at least I know my system will be waiting for me, and can still spend most of the day in next-gen console heaven rather than anxiously waiting on line(s) trying to nab one of the 'first-come-first-serve' 360s.

I'll post first impressions of the console, the expanded XBox Live offerings, and the games themselves over the coming week.