I bought a few months over the christmas break as i had time off and wanted to try a few of my new games online. Ive been Involved in online gaming since the original quake, and have tried most console's online features (excluding ps2).

Setting up XBL was Very easy and fast, just gave it a credit card number, made a new profile, and i was online in about 2 minutes, so very easy to use. looked around the marketplace for new videos, maybe some of these tv shows/movies i'd heard about i could download, but nothing. apparently, because i live in Australia and not the U.S. all i could download was A robbie williams concert. I thought it was a bug, but it turned out to be region specific content, which was extremely disappointing.

Ok, next stop the arcade! Some really good stuff, i bought golden axe and double dragon for just under $10 apiece, both really great, the games look great and the online works well in a coop game, was very happy with the arcade in general.

Next, HALO3! After playing the campaign on legendary twice, (hey i like a decent singleplayer), i was eager for some slayer shenanigans. This is how i was introduced to the way that XBL set up my games, you set filters for what you want in terms of gameplay, ie DM/ TDM and general size/game rules, and the game then dumps you with 11 or so people of seemingly random nationalities. I then pressed A and the game began. So extremely easy to get into a game and get playing, much like you would start a singleplayer game. but there seemed to be no way to get server information, or choose my own based off a list of compatible games, XBL would just pick for me, but then i noticed something else, my latency swung between two extremes, A latency/ping that i would ballpark at 400ms, or seeming LAN speed and everyone else quitting due to "lag"

So.. it would either dump me in an eastern europe server (when asia or even the US would be better), or HOST ON MY XBOX, for the poor unknowning denizens of the rest of the world, i had the same experiences with COD4 and GRAW. So a pretty average experience doing what-it-says-on-the-tin.

Coming from the PCgaming world of ISP dedicated servers, this was ridiculous. Its extremely easy to get into a game, but the experience suffers as a result. As per the original poster, compared to PC online ie Steam, XBL is a joke, where are the hundreds of FPS servers running 120+ people on dedicated servers? CS:S? DOD:S? TF2 24player? .

So all up, GREAT arcade, but anyone who thinks that XBL is as good as it can get, really has not seen online gaming on the PC in the past few years and what it has evolved to.

*but i do recommended getting golden axe, best damn thing about it*

Its pretty good, reminds of a cross between deus ex and morrowind with the whole 1 world with main "quests/missions whatever" and optional side quests minus the lvl switching of the globe trotting adventures of JC The DENT , true not as big as something like oblivion, but I say more detailed and because its smaller seem to fit together quite well.

On a 7600 You'll be able to run it pretty much maxed in terms of textures quality object quality, AA and AF. However.... You WILL(or not if you like 15 fps on a 7600) have to disable HDR (full dynamic lighting or whatever they're callling it this week) which leaves you with static lighting which with brightness and contrast tinkering can look VERY nice and sharp.

I bought a new screen (sorta) for this game, 22 incher. however the colours and TOO rich and looks slightly cartoony, trying to fix it but i dont know a nice ratio of red/green/blue, I attribute this tomy being colour blind and lack of sleep ( not in that order)

So back on topic yeah sure its great whatever. (just play deus ex sometime all you ppl)

wow look at all my brackets.