The Xbox 360 (Pre)orders thread

[ThoseOfTheUnlight]

Play.com ?280. Have a wifi router but I'll be buggered if I'm gonna pay ?60 for the 360 unit. How comes the PSP and DS have this feature built in but not on the 360. Then to charge ?60 for it. What a rip off!

Because the vast majority of 360 owners will NEVER use the wifi options (whereas a lot of people will on the PSP and DS for multiplayer).

Would you want everyone else to pay more for something they dont need?

Hardly a rip off, you simply need to THINK.

[NackNack]

Like an ethernet wireless adapter for ?30 - ?40, or a USB dongle that'll probably work for ?20.

[Pirotic]

What shipping method did you guys go with? i paid the ?4.99 for the fastest 'next working day' option - i'm guessing thats the norm when pre-ordering or should i just of stuck with first class post?

[Spatial]

GAME are doing an Xbox trade-in offer, ?80 off of a 360 when you trade in your solus Xbox console

Excellent. That might let me kill two birds with one stone as I've been trying to get rid of my PAL Xbox for ages

Region encoding is something that I haven't seen mention at all.

That's actually a very good point. If this system is actually region free I will literally mess my pants at the sheer excitement of it all

[sj33]

What shipping method did you guys go with? i paid the ?4.99 for the fastest 'next working day' option - i'm guessing thats the norm when pre-ordering or should i just of stuck with first class post?

GamePlay had free courier

[NackNack]

Excellent. That might let me kill two birds with one stone as I've been trying to get rid of my PAL Xbox for ages

That's actually a very good point. If this system is actually region free I will literally mess my pants at the sheer excitement of it all

Bear in mind this is just off one guy saying on rllmuk, might not be true.

Region free? Would be nice, but I don't see why they'd need to if they're going to release everything everywhere at the same time (natch Australia :P).

[MartyG]

That's actually a very good point. If this system is actually region free I will literally mess my pants at the sheer excitement of it all

Xbox was essentially region free - it was down to the publishers to enable it or not on their software.

[NackNack]

So it wasn't region free.

[Pirotic]

GamePlay had free courier

Gameplay charged me ?4.99 for that! but i just phoned them up and was told they amended all previous orders so you get it for free now.

update - they are still 'amending' them as they've had thousands supposidly, so it may still show the 4.95 for a few days.

still, sounds like its going well!

wootage

[ThoseOfTheUnlight]

Yes, it was region free. Hence why some NTSC games work on a PAL system. It was down to each individual developer.

Most games however, were not.

[Spatial]

Yeah, but they still went ahead and put region coding in even though it was optional (which I still couldn't really get my head around).

It's been mostly Live games that were region free - hopefully with all games this time around needing to be at least Live `aware` then they'll all be region free.

If they are, then I will gladly buy the most expensive 360 pack just to show Microsoft my gratitude for dragging gaming into the modern age

[Pirotic]

publishers pressured some developers to enable region locking. which i can sort of understand.

[MartyG]

So it wasn't region free.

I said it was essentially region free - not it was region free. So nil points.

[RobN]

Because the vast majority of 360 owners will NEVER use the wifi options (whereas a lot of people will on the PSP and DS for multiplayer).

Would you want everyone else to pay more for something they dont need?

Hardly a rip off, you simply need to THINK.

The DS, PSP, Rev and PS3 will all come with built in wi-fi so it's hardly unreasonable to expect the 360 to come with it. I paid ?45 for a wifi router that has 4 ethernet ports as well etc., so ?60 for a unit that only sends/receives info for/from the 360 seems expensive to me. The DS is ?100 and includes it. Talking of including things that people won't use, how about component leads or games in high def? How many people here have a tv with component inputs, and how many have HDTVs? If 5% of households in the Uk had a HDTV I'd be surprised.

[NackNack]

We thought the 360 would come with built-in Wifi, so not fair to assume that the Rev and PS3 will, knowing how stingy they all are.