For the past few weeks, I have been absolutely up to my ears in 360 coverage. It all started over a month ago, when I got the opportunity to go see the system at the post-X05 event in San Francisco. I had played it once before at TGS, but the only game I had played, or had even the time to look at, was an exclusive Japanese party game called Every Party. Obviously, that didn't really give me a good idea of what the 360 was going to be like.

At the X05 event though, I got to sit down with Kameo, Perfect Dark, DOA4, King Kong, Oblivion, and above all, Geometry Wars. I remember talking to J Allard just before interviewing him, and he was all excited about the two player version of Robotron, where you both control the same character. I remember telling Jeff about it, and we were both like... "What?" I mean how crazy is that? Well the answer is (as Jeff would say) "fully crazy", because it's perfectly thought up and executed, and possibly one of the best new ways to play Robotron (but still totally crazy). I mean we couldn't really fathom all of the things that we're now finding out you can do in the Xbox Live Arcade.

I have to say, after this weekend, I'm probably going to be more pumped about the achievement system and the Xbox Live features above anything else (until the truly insane games start coming out), but that's enough to make me seriously think about investing in this system and the HDTV to match, sooner rather than later. That's a little different than what you'll hear me say in our 4 Years Since the Xbox video retrospective, but hey, things change.

One of the things I didn't realize about the 360 is something Brad and I discovered after the Perfect Dark Zero multiplayer extravaganza today (Infected mode = awesome). You can jump into a chat with someone and then go about playing anything you want on Xbox Live Arcade while you talk to each other. That includes single-player games of Geometry Wars or multiplayer versions of Joust over Live.

Fully crazy.