Wow........thats the first thing that comes to mind. I've been saving for an HDTV for way over a year now. Constantly looking at prices and reading reviews was just making the wait even more annoying. I was on the Best Buy website, when I found exactly what I was looking for for less than what I had saved. The stars must have been aligned, or something was in retrograde, because the nearest store had one and everything worked out, for once. I now have a Philips 42" Ambilight 2 1080p LCD HDTV(yeah, its not a Samsung or a Sony, but c'mon, I'm not spending THAT much on a TV!!!!). I'm running my 360 Elite with the HDMI at 1080p for games, and let me say this, I am absolutely amazed. I have until this point been playing all games at 480p, on a 32" flat-screen projection tv that is 3-4 years old. It looked pretty good, and I really didn't think it would be that big of a bump up in quality, but was I ever wrong.
The first thing I played was Stranglehold, because I had just gotten it earlier in the week, and haven'thad any real time to play it. Some of the effects and destructibility are just awesome to behold, but it wasn't quite as awesome as I had hoped. At this high of a resolution, you REALLY notice minor design and programing quirks, some jaggies here and there. Weird. Well, maybe its just the game,I thought. Hmmmmm?????? Jeepers, if only I had an absolutely beautiful game that was ultra awesome to play and super immersive!!:o Oh yeah, I have Bioshock, I think that matches all the criteria listed above. Brain, would you kindly tell my body to put Bioshock in the 360. And then I once again descended to Rapture.
Before I go on to describe how absolutely beautiful this game looked, and how it totally sold me on HD everything, we need a sidebar. See, I live in a shed. Yeah, thats kinda over dramatizing things, but its a shed. My Dad turned it into a practice space/recording studio(my whole family are musicians, me included, but nothing lame like the Partridge Family, I play Black Metal, for Christ sake), so its sheet-rocked, has a small kitchen, couches and now an HDTV. Its not a regular shed, its one of those sheet-metal round ones, that looks like a small airport bunker, so the walls on the inside are curved, much like the interconnecting tubes between the different areas of Rapture. The walls are painted a dark blue, and there are no windows, so it already has this smothering kind of underwater Sea World tube feeling, other than the Drum kit and stuff like that. Its like a time warp, since you can't see outside, and you never really know if the sun is up or if its the middle of the night until you check a clock. The only window is totally blocked with a window AC unit. Oh, I live in the middle of nowhere in Texas, and its really hot right now, so the AC HAS to run 24 hours a day, no ifs ands or buts. Because of this fact, and the fact that its old, it leaks from condensation build up. We have some buckets underneath it to catch the drippage, and luckily it is far away from all the precious electronic and musical equipment. But after the buckets start to get full, they make a very audible dripping sound. Constantly. I can actually hear it right now as I am typing this. It is much like I am already among the corridors of Rapture itself, but then you add in the the Ambilight feature on my TV. I at first thought that this was nothing more than another gimmick. "Oh, good, my TV is gonna be really bright now......great." But after seeing that you can just turn it off with a single press of a button, I said, hey if it sucks I'll just turn it off. Well, it doesn't suck. It has several modes that alter it dramatically, but the Dynamic mode is the best, hands down. It doesn't just change color with whatever is on screen like I thought. It actually fades and blends different colors. It emphasizes shadows wonderfully. Whenever some thing moves on the left hand of the screen, for instance, the lights shift dynamically to create the effect of something moving in front of the light source.And the left and right lights are independent from each other too, so its not all or nothing.It is really impressive, and a feature that I am really surprised with how it is implemented. I hope you see were I'm going with this. Alone, in this Semi-Rapture like tube that I live in(for another week, at least) with the lights out and the constant drip of the AC unit behind me that is keeping me from dying of heat-stroke, and these crazy shifting shadows and sounds, it is the single most immersive gaming experience I have ever had.
Every little pixel of Bioshock looks absolutely amazing on that TV. I played for several hours, neglecting both food and drink, and nearly wet myself several times. I truly felt like I was this poor puppet trapped in this failed utopia. Every-time a splicer moved or babbled incoherently, I felt as if I had heard someone walking behind me, ready to suck the Adam right out of me. I had almost regretted spending as much as I did on a TV, but I feel from that single experience that I got my $ worth. Not to mention the countless moments of sheer joy and gaming bliss that are primed in the next few months(Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect and CoD 4, I'm looking at you), I think I have totally justified my purchase. When I move into my new apartment next week(finally), and I get HD cable and a super awesome Internet connection, I think this will confirm the money spent also. Whats weird is that Bioshock, a 360/PC "exclusive", has damn near sold me on a PS3. Yeah. Crazy, right? If Sony actually gives it a real price cut, and can really sell me on some exclusives other than Killzone 2(which just looks sweet) and MGS4: GotP(Kojima-San is on that border between genius and insanity, and I like that), I could justify shelling out $500 for a system, but not $500 for a system with 2 games that I want to play(although the Blu-Ray player is a nice feature too now that I have an HDTV). I'm a gamer, so I want to play as many sweet games as possible, and I don't really care anymore who makes them. I WANT Sony to sell me on a PS3, really. I just hope they can do it a little sooner than later. Because as of right now, I'm saving up for a better PC. Way more expensive, but until I'm really sold on it, I'd rather just save up for something I know I'll use more than just as a Blu-ray player. In the words of Jimmy Valmer from the beloved town of South Park "I mean, C'mon."