I’ve had an Xbox 360 before (in the pre-order era) but got rid of it since I couldn’t stand the noise it makes. To me, the vacuumcleaning sound coming from a 360 doesn’t really enhance the experience of lying quietly on a roof sniping nazis in Call of Duty 2.

But then I tried out a ton of demos the other week at Louis’ crib. Here’s a few highlights..

• DiRt
  Realistic rally racing - quite nice, but I’m getting the idea the demo isn’t really doing the game a lot of justice.

• Forza 2
  What a killer. Played for a good few hours and not one frame dropped. Ultrasmooth simulation. Liking the fact that the graphics seem tweaked to optimise gameplay, rather then the other way around. This is Fast. Add to shopping cart, ship overnight.

• Halo 3 (full version, not the demo)
  Nice graphics. Quality game, I guess. Didn’t really get into it. Yet.

• Sega Rally (pic above)
  My kind of game: arcade style slip ‘n slide rally racing. We ended up playing this demo all evening - just basic racing to see who is fastest. The demo holds two full maps. We mostly played Canyon 2 and my personal record now is 4:18:26. Liking the dynamically deformable terrain. Bit of a shame though that individual players cannot enter their names for their racetimes. Xbox Live is nice, but playing at home with your buddies trying to beat eachothers laptimes is nice too.

So I went out and bought a 360. Again. Just decided to have Volume Real Loud when playing it this time.

“Austria’s Markus Stoeckl, 33, set a new world record at the weekend for series mountain bikes on a renovated high-speed La Parva run in the Chile’s Alps when he hit a speed of 210.4 km/h (130.7 mph).
He shattered an eight-year-old record by an incredible 23 km/h”.