Continued impressions of the XBox 360, post-launch.
PGR3 - Expanding on what I said before, I have mixed feelings here.
I like that it's harder to lose your kudos combos: it's marginally more forgiving of bumps than the previous version.
It has gone from being my mates' favourite party game to a pretty crap one. PGR2 had four player, PGR3 has two players only. Which, incidentally, makes most of the game modes it offers you when you choose "play on this xbox" absolutely pointless. Eliminator means one-lap race, for instance. And we really miss the slower cars, which made it possible for non-gamers to join in. Now they crash into a wall of twitch. I also miss the variety of the previous game's tracks.
Multi-player online is great, so long as you stick to playtime mode. Kudos racing is often full of morons.
Possible to get a good haul of achievement points, though.
Call Of Duty 2 - I agree with what people have said. For me, it's the stand-out single-player game of the launch. I am not an FPS player at all, but I really wanted to know what happens. Plus, I only felt sick when I should: in the tank missions on veteran and in the bunkers during the barrage on Pointe d'Hoc. Disappointing end, though.
Haven't played multi-player on live, but it's ok-ish in 4-player mode. Any less players and the maps are just too huge. Best balance of achievement points of all my games. Hard to get after basic training and finishing the campaign, but you feel that almost all of the 1000 are achievable with time. Unfortunately, EA has released a cheat code that lets people unlock all 1000 points, to get round the mission-completion-not-registering bug.
Tiger Woods 06 - Sucky. Would a tutorial hurt so much? The putting is, on a 44 inch screen, impossible because the hole is invisible. Controls are ok, but not as good as Links or even PSP Tiger. Pretty looking, but not spectacular on the level of Call Of Duty. Achievement points are a joke. 50 points for being the single best player in the world?!?
Madden NFL 06 - What is EA up to? Insanely complex is ok. But no tutorial or instructions again?!? I mean that: there is nowhere in the game or the documentation that tells you what the buttons actually mean. I actually enjoy it, though, but I've always liked American football games.
Achievement points are far too easy. If you were a catass you could play on the rookie setting and get the whole 1000 in a single afternoon, no problem.
Arcade Live - Definitely a feature I like, at least for potential. Outpost Kaloki sucks, and is almost unplayable except on HD. Geometry Wars is fun. Gauntlet's novelty wore off quickly, but the reminder of how far we've come was good. Hexic is gorgeous but not my bag: I strip-mined it for the easier achievement points then gave up. Give me tetris any day. Backgammon is fun, but the computer cheats: the odds agains four doubles in a row is 6 to the power of 4 against, or one thousand, two hundred and ninety-six to one odds, but I've seen it happen twice in about thirty games.
Pet Arcade hate: if you play a demo then that game's 200 achievement points are added to your potential score, even though you can't get them as it is a trial. So, suddenly, after playing a handful of demos, 1560 out of 4000 becomes 1560 out of 5000.
General Console stuff
Microsoft have done extremely well here. Almost everything just works, from spotting the wireless controllers and connecting automatically to my wireless router, to seamless integration with Live. Things that were a pest in the previous iteration (WEP!) are easy now. Only Media Connect has been stubborn, and Mark tells me that this may be a 3rd party (SecureClient) issue.
In general, this has proved my favourite console launch. Now I can't wait for Elder Scrolls 4, and for Football Manager 06 on the console.