So the 360 it was. I got Madden 08 and BioShock. Madden is generally state-of-the-art, although they’ve gotten a little shady since they’re the only NFL game in town. This year’s version says “new! franchise mode” - right. New in 1999. And then you couldn’t figure out how to cram it into Madden 06 on the 360, even though it was on other platforms, and then everyone took a nap on 07, and now it’s back in 08. The game itself is very, very good - fast, fun, with the right feel. The menus getting there are kind of frustrating. I couldn’t find a camera control (which is actually okay, I guess), and I didn’t know how to save my game the first time through. (Other consoles have an auto-save option - not so with Madden 08 360.) Turns out you click the left stick if you want to save quickly.

BioShock is supposed to be “impressive”. I told Cratchit that I don’t care if it’s fun or interesting - it just needs to justify the investment and represent the first-person shooter in the year 2008. Mostly, it delivers. It provided our first “oh, that’s the game, not the intro” moment. At the same time, it’s delivering a host of “I am better on the mouse than I am on the thumb-stick” moments, and I hope I get over that.

So everything else I’ve played, I’ve played on Xbox Live Arcade. I like it so far - I wondered for a while where you can search for people who might not be your friends yet, and it turns out you can do that online, but not on the box. Before I send a friend invite to “Cratchit”, I want to make sure that it’s really him.

The first game I played on the 360 was actually the Street Fighter II HF demo. It’s emulated from the 15-year-old arcade ROM (there’s a justification for technology!) but I don’t think I’ll be paying $10 to see the rest. I could be wrong. I paid $12.50 to buy 1000 points to spend 800 of them on Pac-Man CE. That game is pretty timeless and bringing back the original guy to help write a real sequel is a classy move. I also bought Puzzle Fighter, and then Cratchit gave me puzzle spankings over the internet.

Rez HD is amazing, and I’m not even playing it in HD. I’ve been wanting it since the PS2 days, through when it hit $80 on eBay. Lumines is another game I thought I’d never get a chance to play, but I’m enjoying the demo quite a bit. It’s probably the next game I’ll buy. My kids grow very quiet, with rapt attention, but that might not be the best measure of value.

My son really, really enjoys the Cars demo, and I haven’t even let him play it yet. He comes from a Pole Position background, and he likes Lightning McQueen more than just about anything else in this world. It’s not a great driving game, and Tractor Tipping with Mater is fun like folding socks is. Depending how low valuations drop on eBay, we might get Cars or the Mater-national sequel.

Their poker game is obnoxious. Boogie Bunnies isn’t trying very hard. Puzzle Quest was a lot of clicking “OK” and then, when it’s time to get down, it’s Bejeweled. (My friends have achievements for these games. Odd.) N+ didn’t make much sense to me, but I didn’t really read the help file. (When the guy kept falling to his death, making a squish sound, and body parts flew everywhere, my daughter told me “he lies down when he’s tired. And he’s really tired.”) Zuma is Zuma. Uno is Uno.

I played Geometry Wars once and that was okay. My wife died three times because she couldn’t figure out how to shoot - game developers, you have to think about moms!

Skate looks like fun, but I hope there’s a learning curve with the controls, and not just endless, hopeless sadness and frustration.

Basically, I bought the thing for the $10 games. I’m definitely getting my money’s worth there. The bigger titles - who knows? Maybe I’ll find time to rip through a $60 fully-featured adventure, but since I appear to be finding endless replay in things like Pac-Man and Puzzle Fighter, my disc library may not grow that much.

We had a DVD player we liked - one that played DivX / Xvid from a disc - and it died. The new version of the same player came with the ability to read USB drives, which is awesome, but it lacked S-video output. This, to me, is like when they pretended to cancel the Whopper. I just stared at the back of my new shiny box, expecting to find a little flap that revealed the S-video output. It did have component output (the red, green, and blue wires), but I had no component cable, much less a fancy high-def TV with color-coordinated inputs. So we downgraded to composite video, which is that yellow wire that beat the pants off RF switches, back when we had those, which was seriously 1988.

The Xbox 360, taken out of the box, also does not have S-video output, but I was prepared for this. I was not planning on doing this until I bought a fancy new TV, but then my wife was there and generally agreeable and I had $349 and I remember bits and pieces after that. But now I had two things that needed to use the yellow input in the back of the TV, so I tried to think about how to connect them both. When I went to the back of the TV, there were red, green, and blue inputs. Component input on my seven-year-old TV. I literally never knew that was there. I hooked that up - the picture is pretty sweet.

I bought an Xbox 360 this weekend. It kind of happened out of the blue, as these things go. At the same time, it was inevitable. (I jumped the gun a little bit on my plan to upgrade the TV before buying new components.) But I’d made up my mind about Wii vs. Xbox 360 vs. PS3, and I’m terrible at waiting once I’ve made up my mind. Adam and I went to go play video games at Target, and when I came back to the cart, my wife said “well, did you buy one or not?”

“I didn’t think I had permission, exactly.”

“Dan, once you’ve made up your mind about these things, they pretty much just happen. It’s your money.”

True, I’d made up my mind seven years earlier to buy a PS2 as soon as they were back in stores at retail prices. That time, though, I hadn’t really mentioned it to her beforehand, and for some reason I remember it being a day or two before her birthday, and… well, things didn’t go well.

But that means we’ve been on the same platform for 7 years.

So how had I made up my mind about the 360? Mostly, I think it’s exposure to the blog over at Penny Arcade. They are, every week, talking about a new demo or $10 downloadable game. (Pac-Man CE and Rez HD come to mind.) I buy maybe 3 games a year - but downloaded mini-games seemed like something more casual, something the kids or their mom might enjoy. And December 2007’s software update, which lets the Xbox 360 play DivX/Xvid really tipped the scales. (I burn a lot of CDs full of two episodes of this, or a video podcast of that - networking the solution is a much better plan.)

That’s not to say that the Wii or PS3 never entered my mind. The high-def DVD war ended last week, and the format backed by the PS3 won. The PS3 is, by many accounts, the best available Blu-ray player. (It is fairly cheap, anyway.) But it’s still very expensive, and I haven’t heard a ton about PS3 games that I absolutely have to play. That might change over the next year, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything there. The Wii is a different story - I think the Wii is video game history. It’s put a charming face on gaming, and welcomed thousands to a really unique experience. And it’s got as compelling an online-download store as Xbox has, so that’s a consideration. There are so many strikes against the Wii, though: first, it doesn’t do any kind of network media playback, and I’m a little concerned about the technology. The harshest thing you can say about the Wii is that it’s not a huge leap beyond the GameCube, and that’s basically correct. The big selling point is the full-motion-capturing controller setup, but in my experience with it, the pointing and the gyroscopes and the motion detection are all a little imprecise. If you’ve ever hurt your arm during a tennis match, while a more experienced opponent sat on the couch, wrist-flicking you into submission, you know what I’m talking about. And I hear a TON about Wii Sports and Wii Play, but almost nothing else about any of the other games available on that system. Certainly not third-party stuff. But the biggest obstacle for me is that I’ve still never seen one in a retail store. Some sites sell them, when they get them, in bundles, full of games I’d never otherwise consider purchasing. And not useful bundles with the extra controllers and accessories that normal people buy - they make you buy things like the Silver Surfer game.

So the 360 it was.