Well, most of it, anyways.
I’ll admit it. I used to bash the Xbox pretty regularly. For the longest time all it had going for it was pretty graphics and Microsoft’s money. In large part, that’s all it’s still got.
Unless you hack it.
I picked one up this week. I wasn’t even looking to buy one, ’til one came up for sale on a local ESL teachers’ message board. $85 for a two-month old Xbox with four games. A pretty good deal, for sure. I didn’t like any of the games, but I knew I could trade them in, so I scooped it up. I traded in all the games at the electronics market in Seoul today, and that brought the effective price down to $45.
Even more of a steal.
Then, I went the extra mile. I had the puny 8-gigabyte drive replaced with a 120-gigabyte one, and had a modchip put in.
I now own the ultimate home media and gaming machine.
That may sound like an overstatement, but I assure you, it’s not. With this one console I can play regular DVDs, watch movies and TV shows downloaded from the internet, run emulators allowing me to play NES, Super NES, Genesis, Gameboy, Nintendo 64 and Playstation games – oh yeah, and Xbox games too.
There is one drawback though. It’s a Korean system, so if I want to play any Xbox Live (online) games, I have to have the store-bought, Korean versions. But with everything else it can do, why would I need to do that?I may have talked bad about the Xbox in the past, and a lot of what I’d said still holds true. But with the proper hacks and upgrades, it’s a phenomenal piece of hardware. One I’m very happy to own.
I’ll talk more about this later. For now, I need to get back to watching movies, and reveling in the majesty of my new purchase. ^.^