XBox 360: The New Addiction

We got a pretty nice refund from the Feds this year, and to celebrate, hubby bought us an XBox 360. He's been wanting one for a long time, as he's a big fan of the Halo game series, and the next one will be coming out for the 360 soon. He also had a good time playing Mike's racing game this past weekend, so it gave him another reason to have one. He bought the core system, instead of the elite system that costs another $100, but comes with a hard drive and some other extra stuff. After a while of moving wires and disconnecting and reconnecting some of our existing game systems, he was ready to go. We bought two games to start with, Viva Pinata, and Crackdown. Viva Pinata was bought mostly for me, for reasons I'll get into in a minute. :)

We noticed that on the box for the Core system it says "memory unit - separate". Now, we have the original XBox, and one of the things we really liked about it was that it had integral memory, like a hard drive, already inside it, so we never needed memory cards to save games on. We assumed that the 360 would be the same, that the extra hard drive was there for extra storage space, and that was it. Well, when we started it up, we found out we were wrong. Hubby let me play Viva Pinata first, and once we got into the menu, it said that there was no gamer profile, and without one, I couldn't save my progress. And apparently you need an outside memory unit, whether it be a hard drive or a memory card, to create a gamer profile. Sigh. I would not be deterred, however. We'd already watched the opening movie for the game, and I was excited to play, so I started up a game without the card, just to be able to play.

Four hours later, and VERY tired, I sort of wished I had went to get a memory card. Viva Pinata is a pretty fast-paced game, and I had made a lot of progress in my garden. See, the idea with this game is that you build a garden to attract the different kinds of pinatas. Then when they come to live in your garden, you can "romance" them, and they will make baby pinatas. Hubby said that there are around 80 different kinds of pinatas, and I didn't come close to that number in the time I played. However, I managed to get my gardener status upgraded a couple of times, and I had a pretty good variety of pinatas running around my garden. One of the things I especially liked was the feeling of discovery that the game generates. You start out with a wrecked garden, and it's your job to get it into shape. They give you a shovel to start breaking up the junk that's lying around, and break up the hard dirt so that you can start planting things. It's also good as a defense against predator pinatas, because believe it or not, there's a pinata food chain! To get one of the bird pinatas ready for "romance", it has to eat a worm pinata. So if you want to keep your bunny rabbits, you'd better start beating up the foxes before the bunnies become lunch! :)

So far my favorite pinata is the Mousemallow, but that's probably just because it's the cutest one I've seen! I can't wait to get out of work today and start playing again! :)