I'm happy. Do I think it was necessary to get one right away? Certainly not.
I got Perfect Dark and Kameo, both of which I think are pretty good. I haven't played them very much, so that opinion could change by the time I beat the games, but it Perfect Dark reminds me of the original, which is a good thing, and Kameo reminds me of the Rare/Nintendo days on the 64, which, again, is a good thing.
Might the PS3 be loads more powerful than the 360? Yes, but I don't really care. I'm impressed by the 360 as a piece of hardware, and moreso as a platform. It's not just the hardware, but the conceptual design of the 360 as a platform. The Dashboard is so useful and allows you to do so much stuff. Live Arcade is great. The ability to download trailers and game demos, skins and themes, etc. is all great. Being able to stream media from a PC is also pretty cool. Even things like being able to set your preferences for normal/inverted vertical look from the 360 Dashboard and have that be applied to all the games you play are innovative ideas.
They've taken the game console beyond the the basic ability to run game software, and it's not frivolous. Sure, thee things aren't necessary to have a good game console, but I really think it advances the design of a gaming platform. It makes it better. Before, a NES to SNES to N64 meant beter graphics, better sound, different controllers, etc. With the 360, all of that is there, but you're advancing the features of the game platform.
The 360 is a great step into a new generation of gaming. We're at a time when I think, like Nintendo has been saying, better graphics don't matter as much. When you went from 2D game consoles, to hardware that could display 3D, you opened up new gaming worlds. When we went from the N64 to GameCube and Xbox, we now could have gaming worlds that were large and more interactive. Textures could be used to distinguish game objects better, etc. The PSX and PS2 and later consoles made musical games possible with the ability to play high quality music tracks.
However, with this next generation of gaming, I'm not going to say that we've definitely reached the limit of exploiting better graphics and sound for new gameplay mechanics, but we certianly have to try harder I would say. Sure, maybe some one will make a game in which you really need to be able to distinguish objects by their high lighting and shading qualities in order to play the game or something, or maybe nearly perfectly round objects will be necessary to simulate some kind of physics, but for the most part, I'm going to say that the vast majority of games that we'll see on the 360 could have been don on the original XBox, perhaps not as beautifully. So I think Microsoft's contribution to the advancement of gaming is turning their platform into something more than just a machine that plays game software.
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