As I’m typing this there’s a brand new Xbox 360 sitting on my desk. It’s the first new major console release since the original Xbox came out here on 14th March 2002, and I’d forgotten how much fun it is to wait for a new console and go and pick it up on launch day. Probably not so fun for the countless disappointed people (I was in the VGC yesterday for about half an hour and they must have had about ten calls, and apparently it’s even worse today) who aren’t going to be getting them until the new year, but the anticipation is always great and pays off when you get home with the new hardware and hook it up for the first time.

Between 9pm and midnight last night all of us who were getting machines plus a few more were in the shop playing all the launch games (I didn’t think there was a real dud in there, but the EA games hadn’t arrived yet) and then took them home at midnight to get some next-gen gaming goodness before bedtime. My bedtime ended up being well after 4am, but it was worth it. I’m in love with this machine.

I’ll post some more comprehensive impressions of what I’ve got later, but suffice it to say both Project Gotham 3 and Call of Duty 2 look amazing (even on my regular TV) and the hardware is hugely impressive, and it’s forced me to move the purchase of an HDTV up the agenda. Fuck waiting for them to get cheaper, I need it now! In the meantime here’s my Gamer Card, and I’m off to play some more.

As you can probably see I’ve bought one of the Penny Arcade icon packs as well as some online retro goodness in the form of Smash TV. Even premium content isn’t out of bounds in my new console stupor. One other quick note for those who don’t want to wait until January is that the US version of Ridge Racer 6 is multiregion, so the lucky UK 360 owners out there can import earlier and cheaply.