I've had my new Xbox 360 for a whole weekend so it's clearly time to reflect on the experience thus far. I'm sure I'm bringing nothing new to the 360 table as it's been out for years but this is my first serious experience with it.

1. The Purchase

After wandering around a few stores locally: stopping first at Toys 'R' Us the £299.99 deal for a premium system with an extra controller, Gears of War, Project Gotham 3 and Crackdown looked good, but sadly no Gears of War in stock; Currys, Comet and PC World were all a bust as the deals there where abysmal; I happened upon Choices and they had the same deal as Toys 'R' Us but actually had Gears of War in stock. I also added Dead Rising to the list and that was a decent price at £20 or so for a second hand copy also, rather nicely of them, they threw in the PES 6 bundle so I had PES 6 for free too. I'm not much of a footie fan but free's free.

2. The Unboxing

Firstly, as a near-life long Apple fan and certainly an admirer of the design sense in their packaging the unboxing experience is a complete let-down. I don't have a PS3 so I cannot comment on that, but I suspect Apple is the only electronics company to currently get this initial and crucial customer experience right and to do it well.

Squashed in a bulging text-strewn package were a few nebulous green bags containing various cables and a huge powerbrick, seriously huge and noisy because it has it's own fans. I'm sure anyone with a 360 will understand what I mean, but before I got one I didn't realise quite how noisy the 360 itself is and how large and noisy the powerbrick is specifically - noisy like a desktop computer.

Some of the extra pieces (including the controller) were in that nasty vacuum sealed stiff bubble plastic stuff which managed to remove a few layers of skin and slice my hands as I heroically (and impatiently) struggled to get my prize from it's casing. So I eventually managed to gather all the cables (why no RGB scart?), plug them in the right ports (the power port is ridiculously large and complex to go with the powerbrick) and stack up a big pile of various papers including instructions and Christ knows what else and turn the thing on.

3. It Lives

Nice boot screen, after a few false starts going round in circles with 'yes I do want to update' - 'downloading' - 'download failed' - back to the start, before I realised I had to set the 360 to the DMZ zone on my router and then an hour or so typing in text very slowly with the controller to set up my gamertag and Xbox Live account I was up and running.

4. Before the games

The 'blade' interface; It's a good idea, but so badly implemented: cluttered and confusing - it's all to glance at it thinking you're in one blade (or 'tab' to the rest of the world) when you're in another but it's too late as you've already skipped on past it. Getting from any one section to another takes an age, for example I like to see the active downloads, but that is Xbox Live -> Marketplace -> Active Downloads. Sounds easy enough? but not when you're in the demos section.

The friends system is really good, especially when compared with my previous experience on the PS2. Being able to see what your friends are up to and invite them into a game at any point is a real revelation and very smoothly implemented with little pop-up windows and audible dings in-game as they go online.

Demo and video downloads are also well implemented, with the ability to queue downloads in the background, they even seem to pause and resume apparently flawlessly. My only hiccup was the Lost Planet demo which my 360 assured me had downloaded but I could not find anywhere.

Downloads, well now, what a great idea - I just can't help but feel though that Microsoft and the other games publishers are using it as excuse to squeeze yet more money from their customers in the form of micro-payments. They tease you with a few freebies then charge you an apparently nominal amount of confusingly structured Microsoft Points to actually get anything decent. It's a really low and cheeky trick which leaves a bad taste in my mouth - the taste would be dulled somewhat if these publishers actually gave a bit more meat gratis and if your Gamerscore could in some way be converted into currency rather than being "Wow! look at how rad I am, Ive got 50,000 points! I'm the big mac daddy!" - unless I've missed that use. The money-grabbing qualities of this system are particularly apparent with the Xbox Live Arcade games, tiny (they should be but they're actually 20mb or more), often very old games (such as Contra, Joust and Smash TV) or throw away games which have a small aspect of the game free on trial mode, but to actually play multi-player or past the first few levels you have to pay for

5. Playing the games

I dived straight in with Crackdown, an amusing GTA-eqsque crime fighting game. Single player mode is distracting and fun, amazing graphics but seemingly lacking much (if any) depth. Multi-player I'd heard was much more fun, unfortunately a recent update seems to have left it crippled and I just had a generic "your network seytings mean you are unable to host a game" (or join one).

Project Gotham 3 was more fun initially, but not really a driving game, it's very arcadey and really not my style of racing, I really like the GT or Toca series with their higher levels of realism. I'm also now so used to using a force-feedback wheel that the controller feels wrong. The Xbox really seems to lack decent home-grown racing games and the fact that the original Xbox doesn't support force-feedback is a real indication of this. I'm looking to get a wheel at a later date but I noticed the official MS 360 comes with PGR 'force-feedback edition' - what the fuck? So the standard one doesn't support force-feedback? Online racing was fun but is as ever spoiled be fuck-wads cheating.

Gears of War, now there's a game. I jumped straight into a multi-player game with old friends from OAP who are now on FRAG and had great fun dying lots (mainly via a chainsaw to the head) in sumptuous graphics because I had no-idea what I was doing. I then tried a split-screen co-op with friends which was also much fun and very confusing. The graphics a great but it does seems to have classic Xbox texture jumping as it (I guess) loads the textures.

The game I've played the most so far (though not under my profile) is Dead Rising. What a fun, violet, brutal, amusing, inventive game. This has to be played for a while to appreciate the entertainment to be derrived from killing zombies in X number of ways, but believe me it is fun sticking a showerhead in a zombies forehead to watch it spray blog, or spilling perfume on the floor as they stumble and slip or melting their faces with a frying-pan or sticking a severed forearm in their mouths, etc etc etc etc really. I plan to play this through the 72 hours killing zombies then attempt it properly on next go. 'Just one more zombie then I'm turning the 360 off' hehe. An online version of this with 5-10 of you slaughtering oncoming zombies would be awesome!

The live arcade games and demos are an amusing diversion but really need more thought towards the consumer like some actually fully unlocked free games, the sticky tongued hippy-pixie like "Wik: Fable of Souls" was one of the best.

6. And finally

I like it, asides from the few minor annoyances it's a great system. I just can't help but think how much of a better job Apple would have done with the whole experience though. The hardware design on the box itself is horrendous, the hard drive on top looking like an after-though and the powerbrick being it's all too obvious secret shame but it's really not all that bad. Now if they can only get away from using technical terms in the setup which are fine on a personal computer but have no place on consumer equipment then they'd be getting there. Really, who but geeks know or care what and IP or DNS is? Sure you might need it to trouble-shoot network problems but that shouldn't be presented in the way it is. That bugged me with the PS2 and it bugs me just as much with the 360.