After more than a week, here are me' thoughts so far:
On the console itself.
Never been this impressed with a game console.While there are, of course, picky oversights that need to be corrected (DOWNLOAD FILES IN BACKGROUND), the engineering put into this thing blows me away. Live integration is brilliant. XBLA rocks, etc, etc.
The controller is the best pad I've ever used. I have a hard time imagining being satisfied with a PS3 controller that doesn'th have -both- analog triggers -and- shoulder buttons now. I always loved the analog triggers on the Dreamcast pad, and now there's enough buttons to boot. The build quality of the pad is also fantastic. It feels truly solid, great buttons, great sticks. Only the d-pad feels just slightly worse than the original Xbox controller-S.
On the games themselves:
Kameo: better than I hoped after the demo, standard story there. It's a lot more polished than I hoped given Rare's track record (more on that below). Virtually rock solid frame rate, lots of detail. Bad design on the humanoid characters, yet cool and appealing design on the creatures and Kameo's warriors. The gameplay itself is queer in that it feels a bit un-evolved and N64-ish, but also has a lot of neat new details and ideas. Much more good than bad.
CoD2: awesome game, amazingly shitty Live support. Patch this damn thing already. Looks great, but "launch game-itis" shows pretty bad in the highly inconsistent frame rate. Yet the frame-rate issues are not as annoying as PD0 due to the style of the game and is sheer, gut-wrenching intensity. Probably my favorite FPS title in general to date.
Ridge Racer 6: better than RR5 and RR PSP, looks sharp and super clean, but as with all the modern RR games takes way too long to heat up to the real action. The World Xplorer is an fantastic idea for an arcade racer, but Namco needs to evolve the core of RR really bad. It's still a great arcade racer.
PGR3: I'm a MSR/PGR fan big time, and this doesn't disappoint. Looks fantastic. Plays perfectly for me. Deep, long, blah blah, great Live support. I miss the DJs and Diet Tango quite a lot though. About the only other bad thing is I think it could have used at least one more "normal" city. Nurb is a great addition but somehow feels more like a bonus area than a proper Gotham location. Of course, if DLC size isn't as restrictive as Xbox 1, they could go nuts and throw in a full-sized city or three to download.
PD0: Ah, look, it's old-school Rare. Turn on every effect, combine with questionable art and design, and don't worry about the frame rate. PD0's frame dropping is a lot more disappointing to me than CoD2, 'cause when CoD2 slows down, god damn it, it has a reason to. Vast smoke, tons of fire and explosions, etc. Meanwhiile, PD0 just has random slowdown, along with embarassingly jerky cut-scenes. It can render a ten mile wide city, but can't play a scene of two characters shooting in a hallway without stuttering animation and camera panning - WTF Rare! It's both good and bad; it's a lot of fun, yet feels old. It plays good yet moves slowly in some ways. Of their launch games, Kameo feels nice and polished, PD0 feels 6-8 weeks from being done. The single player level design is better than the crap that Bungie thinks is acceptable for Halo, yet still suffers a bit from copy and paste rooms and hallways. I wish there was a CoD2 style radar waypoint system rather than the dumb arrows to hold your hand - I just turn 'em off entirely. Basically, Rare needs to take a look at what other games are like these days before designing their next project.
Overall, I have to admit this is the best I've felt about a launch in a long while, now that I actually have the gods-damned system. It feels like there's much more potential here than the original Box. I'm jumping up and down to get DoA4 in 2 days; I think that will fully complete the launch experience, and I sure as hell expect it to equal PGR3 as the most polished and complete-feeling launch title.
