100% no it's not worth Epic actually put a little effort into the single player campaign this time with somewhat of an actual story, but it's unbeliably short, and really serves as little more than an advanced practice run or training program if you will, for the online which is 95% of what the game is aimed at.

Unless money means nothing to you, you will be sorry you spent 60 bucks on it if your not planning to play online.

It depends on what timeframe your looking at from the past. First off, that guy that says the PS3 has a failure rate that is less than 1% doesn't know what he is talking about. The PS3 does fail, it does have issues of it's own when it comes to reliablity.

On the whole though, up until September, the PS3 had a massive reliablity edge, it's also much quieter during operation, and a little cooler running although neither system can be thrown in an enclosed entertainment center and expected to live very long.

The 360 has had a long list of improvments that have peaked to date with a total Motherboard revision and a switch to 65nm CPUs and E-DRAM chips. it still has a 90nm hotter running GPU, but overall the system is quieter and cooler running and most importantly a lot more reliable.

Even with the changes, the PS3 is still the more reliable system and the quieter of the two, but overall the reliablity comparison is much closer than it was 6 months ago.

Consider though that there are reports that the 40 gig PS3, aka (the 20 gigs slightly less retarded POS brother) has had a much higher failure rate than the 60 and 80 gig units due to cost cutting measures in various areas to get the price down. Just keep that in mind if your looking around and comparing what you want in a console.

At the time the Elite Launched in April, it hada new motherboard revision and a few changes to the internals that made people believe it would be less likely to suffer the RRoD. It is less prone to the RRoD because they essentially epoxied the GPU and CPU to the motherboard to keep it from warping, which was and is considered the single biggest RRoD failure cause.

I have a launch Elite, and it runs just as hot as the other ones, in fact I think it runs hotter than my January 06 premium I had before it. It also featured the worst of the 360s DVD drives, the Hitachi which was the original launch 360 drive that they recycled out to the Elites on launch and do still use on a less frequent occasion still today. It's the loudest and it failed on me just a few days ago in fact. But up until that, no problems and no RRoD from my Elite, but it still ultimately bricked after only 7 months.

Since September however, most if not all 360s being produced have the new Falcon 65nm CPU board, which runs cooler and has even more changes and the BenQ DVD drives are the now predomant drive used, and are the quietest and supposedly most reliable of the drives. This board/drive combination though is used in all 360 models, not just the Elite, and with the inclusion of HDMI ports on all consoles now, the only thing the Elite has is the big HDD and the fact that it is black, but other than that, it doesn't offer any exclusive components internally or port wise over any other 360 console like it did when it launched.

As far as your game save situation. Yes, you can take a memory card and move your saves over to your 360 from your friends. However, all save files are encoded with the creator's gamertag, so if your friend made the save and used his gamertag on hisconsole to play the game. When you transfer them over, they will work fine and you will be able to use the save, but you will NOT be able to gain any achievement points off those saves using your own Gamertag on your own system. So if you care about achievements or your gamerscore, keep that in mind.

Other than that, good luck and enjoy.

Yeah, the list is fine, but if your so damned loaded with cash, that you can throw down over $1500 at once to buy the console and all those games, then why the hell have thrown away over 2 years of gaming goodness? You could have been enjoying many of those games when they were at thier peak and new, and had time to space them all out and enjoy them properly.

Now your just gonna have a wad of crap to sort through and many more new and better games will come out before you ever get through all those games. Why even bother with some of those now, a few of them are 2 years old with sequels either coming out down the line or very soon in some cases.

Just doesn't make any sense, but your call.

Is there anywhere you can buy just the internals of the 360 wireless controllers? Without the case on it.

I found some really awesome custom cases, but I don't want to spend $120 on buying a case and a brand new controller with a case that I won't use.3rd party controllers suck, I don't trust a used controller enough to rip it apart and put warn out guts into a brand new case just so it can fail on me. So my only option is to buy a new wireless controller, but like I said, I don't want to spend 50 bucks on a sealed and packaged controller I'm gonna rip the case off, unless I have to.

Anybody got any suggestions?

It's the way business works. Especially the video game industry. Sony and Nintendo offer services and games and all kinds of stuff in Japan either way before anywhere else, or they sometimes never offer it outside of Japan. They are Japanese companies, so that's to be expected. Microsoft is an American company, and it makes sense they would do the same thing in the US.

It's not strictly a national pride thing at all, it's the simple fact that for all three companies, thier home regions are super strong points for thier business models, Microsoft is even more dependant on the US than anyone is, nearly 70% of thier consoles are US sales. It makes sense that extra effort and maybe some preferential treatment is given to that fanbase.

The cold hard reality is, that the US and North America is by a large margin, the single biggest market for most technology items and especially the video game industry, when your in a battle for market share, you simply have to do more to try and fight for extra ground in the biggest battlefield.

Microsoft when it comes to console hardware is far from being an industry dominator, they are still struggling to become a lasting and established front runner, and the games division of Microsoft corporate rarely ever makes a profit and is so far in the hole over the long run, that it's unbelievable.

Microsoft Corporate doesn't care all that much whether the games division loses money or not, but that patience is only going to last for so long, they are pushing with all they can muster to try and turn the division into a regularly productive and profitable section of the company, and to do that, they first have to be the dominant or alteast co front runner of thier own region. I think they have clearly shown that that is thier intent, and when that happens, they will try and make more and more of a push towards other regions, which they have already made some progress with.

That is also the reason they charge for DLC, atleast for a certain amount of time, even though the Dev may want it to be free. In the long run, this rakes in 100s of millions of dollars to improve the books for the game division and ultimately keep them more in corporates good graces and pumping out more and better games for us. BTW, in almost all circumstances, the developer wants to charge for DLC, because they make money too, if in some cases IE Epic wanting the GoW stuff free, Microsoft at the very least puts a timer on the pay to play, and after 6 months or a year, it then becomes free, and last time I checked, they aren't putting a gun to your head to force you to buy it while it's pay to play.

It's just a reality, that some regions are just not important to the industry, Ireland and Greece,as well as many other countries, while great countries with a lot to offer world culture, are little more than a blip on the radar to a game developer or console manufacturer.

Yeah, you could make the argument that if Microsoft or any big company made the push to offer more content and more perks in those areas, that they would become more of a factor, but the reality is, is due to many factors, sales in terms of raw numbers are never going to be high enough to bother with making a huge effort inmost of thosecountries. For MS you especially have to consider, that for 5 years now, they spent millions and millions of dollars and put a huge effort into trying to break ground in Japan, and it was pretty much a wasted effort. They are not likely to spend money they don't really need to, just to appeal to small market countries with Live content.

OK guys I'm getting a 360 soon and I have two questions. How many years of warranty do you get from MS for free and If the MS warranty isn't good enough, where should I buy my 360?ratchet3

The free MS warranty is 1 year for everything, that includes the Power Supply, the controller, any random failure or issue. They have extended the RRoD coverage to 3 years, but that is only if the system sufferes a RRoD hardware failure, it doesn't cover non RRoD issues, which can still be a lot.

The extended Warranty is 50 bucks and gives you 2 years of complete coverage and of course there is still the 3 years on RRoD, and I believe after the warranty expires, you can still extend it for another 2 years for another 50 bucks, but I'm not certain on that.

The only downside to MS's warranty is that your without a system for up to several weeks and at best usually a week or two but it can be up to 5 or 6 weeks or more. Also, often they will repair the system but not replace it. But the upside, is that you don't lose all your DLC and stuff like that if you send it in to MS, if you havea replacement plan, you will run into issues with certain DLC and especially if your not constantly conected to Live.

The longest replacement plan that I know of, and probably the best is also the most expensive, and that is Circuit City used to and I believe still offers a 3 year replacement plan. But it's over $100 if memory serves.

How the hell can you work at Game Crazy and not be able to answer any of your own questions here? You must be a real help to the customers.

Anyway. The above poster is potentially wrong. SOME of the 360 Arcade consoles have the 65nm CPU and D-RAM Falcon motherboards, repeat SOME. It depends when it she bought it and more importantly when the console was made and by what production team. The easiest way to know, is, there is a white sticker on the outside of the box, and on the last two little lines on that sticker on the bottom, it has the power supply information. The old consoles have a 203 Watt Power Supply, so there will be a 203 W or something along those lines in that description on the sticker.

Most of the Falcons have a new 175 Watt Power supply because they don't require as much power. So they have a 175 W in that same place on the sticker. There are Falcons that have 203 Watt power supplies, but without opening up the box and taking off the faceplate, or without having detailed batch information to read off the ID tag on the back of the console, the easiest way is to have a 175 W unit, because only Falcons have that power supply.

The 360 Arcade does have an HDMI port, but it does not have a cable in the box, and it also does not even come with Component cables, Composite (STANDARD DEF) only. It does have a wireless controller instead of the old wired controller that the cores used to come with.

The Arcade is better than the old Core units, but thier still essentially the core units. They have a 256mb memory unit, which is good enough for game saves for quite a few games and your profile and that's about it. You won't be downloading any demos, any more than an arcade game or two, and very little DLC to that Card.

Because it does not feature an HDD, it does not support BC with original Xbox games, so if you have an xbox and ever want to play your old games on the 360, tough luck.

Because the console is the base system, it gets the bulk of the crap part leftovers. They still see the highest count of Hitachi DVD drives which suck royal ass, they are the loudest and least reliable of the 3 different manufacturers that MS has used in the 360. I have had 2 fail on me. So watch out for that if you get the Hitachi Drive.

If it's a Falcon, you shouldn't have to be as cautious with cooling, and you should have a much better chance of it lasting a while, but bottom line is, don't go into it, expecting the thing to last for as you put it "years to come". Your only going to set yourself up for sadness. I've tried everything and I know a lot of other people who have tried a lot of different ways to baby the system, and there really isn't a way. You try and do the obvious things like keep it well ventilated and in a cool area as you can, and don't let it sit in a real dusty area if you can help it, but outside of that, you just play it and hope for the best. But be prepared for it to die in the not so distant future. I'm not saying it can't last for a few years, but it has a more than desirable chance of breaking, it's just the way it is.

My best suggestion to you, is buy the extended warranty from MS for 50 bucks. Yeah, they extended the warranty of the RRoD failures to 3 years, but that only covers the system if it is in fact RRoD. There is plenty else that can break or fail and not necessarily give you a RRoD, so keep that in mind.

Other than that, enjoy it.

The $350 360 AKA the Premium/Pro console, has a 20 gig standard HDD, but in actuality, it only has 13 gigs that are actually usable to us. The other 7 gigs are used for system information, BC games, caching during gameplay and that kind of stuff, so you'll only have access to 13. This console does now feature an HDMI port, but it does not come with an HDMI cable. It does however come with a composite/component cable set, and the component cables to carry an HD signal.

The $450 360 AKA the Elite, has a 120 gig HDD, of which around 111 gigs is accessable. It features an HDMI port as well and includes an HDMI cable, as well as the standard composite cables and the inferior HDcomponent cables.

Look, everyone just needs to calm down here, and instead of acting like idiots, some people here need to educate themeselves on the situation in thier own area. There are a huge amount of issues that could be at play here, and ranting like an idiot that all Best Buy PRPs are useless is just ignorant of you.

It may be a matter of state law changing since you bought your PRP. For example, in my State, in the last several months, state law has changed regarding warranty coverage. Now it doesn't impact every store chain, but for instance EB/Gamestop. They normally offer a single year replacement plan on all thier consoles, although now the entire chain has discontinued warranties on 360s, but that doesn't change anything.

Normally if you buy a console from EB/Gamestop and pick up the 1 year warranty, you have 1 year from the date of purchase to take it in and get a new replacement console no questions asked. Well because my states law has changed, now the way the warranty works, is that for the first year, it's under manufacturers warranty, so for example if I bought a PS3, and it broke after 7 months of use, I would have to send the console in for service through Sony, for the first year. After 1 year is up, then my 1 year replacement plan comes into effect, and after that first year and for one entire year thereafter, I can then use my 1 year replacement warranty.

The State essentially forced EB/Gamestop to offer thier warranty in addition to the 1 year manfucturers warranty, so your getting twice the coverage, but it works rather oddly. Before you go flying off the handle at Best Buy, know your state laws, or country laws if your not in the US, and make sure they have not changed, because if they have, Best Buy may have no choice in the matter. This is only aState law in my case, and other states vary with thier own policy on such matters, but they can change and as soon as they go into effect, itno longermatters what contract you agreed to with Best Buy or any retailer that is bound by that given law. In my case,EB/Gamestop isaffected, but Best Buy is not, so thier PRP is just as good as it always was.

You also need to know the store you are dealing with, and thier policy on things like this, again I know Gamestop is like this. They give the store manager quite a bit of freedom to run things as they see fit. For instance, my local Gamestop, used to have a great manager, that would really go out of thier way to help you out. They changed managers, and everything changed. The new manager will not allow you cancel a reserve on a game or change it until after the game is released, most stores let you change it or cancel it anytime before release. Gamestop warranties are supposed to be no hassle, no questions asked, but that new manager double and triple checked to see that the problem was genuine and messed around until you were ready to puke. There were many inconviences with that manager, so I called corporate, and found out that Gamestop allows thier managers to set a whole list of policies at their discretion, as long as it doesn't break any civil laws or discrimanatory factors. It is fully in thier rights, and perfectly legal to change store policy at any time.

I don't know if Best Buy has that kind of manager power, but you should find out before condeming all Best Buy PRPs, because clearly the store's overall policy on them has not changed.

Just do some research and educate yourself and then take the fight back to them if you have any ground to stand on.