Jason F.C. Clarke

Like many New Englanders, DG and I have been impoverished by incredibly high heating bills. We have electric heat, so that gets wrapped into our electric bill. Given the high bills we’ve had the last two months, DG suggested that perhaps the new Xbox 360 was eating up a lot of power.

As I was both curious about that myself—and feeling defensive of my beloved console—I decided to do a little digging online. First up was this article, which showed that, during game use, the 360 eats up an impressive amount of power, while our Wii sips lightly at the electric tap (with the commensurate dip in graphics complexity):

The whole article is interesting and informative, and sheds light on something I’d never really thought about before.

Of course, the real question is how this translates into higher digits on my electric bill. As it turns out, if I were to leave my Xbox 360 on all the time, the cost would be about $20 a year according to this article, whose writer based the numbers on what NStar was charging him in the Boston surburbs. Given that we live in Brighton, that’s probably about dead-on for us. $20 spread over the course of the year isn’t bad at all, and it definitely isn’t accounting for our massively high energy bills, particularly given the fact that I don’t leave my 360 on (and have also stopped leaving my PC on during the day).

So apparently the high bills are mostly heating costs. Still, it’s nice to be aware of this. The seventh generation consoles represent a large jump in energy usage, since the most power-hungry sixth-generation console (the original Xbox) cost only $8 a year. And given the size of the 360’s massive power brick, and the fact that it vents enough heat to warm our study, I can’t say I’m surprised.

I was really excited to get an Xbox 360 back in December. Thinking back, though, I can’t remember exactly why I decided I wanted a new videogame system. I’m not sure which games I was looking forward to, other than, obviously, Halo 3.

I found out about Gears of War and that became the reason I was getting a 360. I played GoW for about a month straight, but I don’t think I’ve played it in almost a week. I’ve beaten the campaign on three difficulty levels and played through the entire game as the second player in co-op, so there are really no more worlds to conquer there (and personally, I don’t find either the gameplay or the campaign quite as entertaining as the Halo series—I’m currently replaying Halo for the second time in two months, having played through Halo 2 in the interim). However, Microsoft has a few interesting aces up its sleeve when it comes to keeping me playing between big releases like Gears of War and Halo 3.
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I’ve got to agree with most of the choices in this article, “Gaming’s Greatest Guns”. I’ve played most of those games and the choices are dead-on, especially DOOM II‘s double-barreled shotgun, Duke Nukem 3D‘s shrink-ray, Halo‘s pistol and Perfect Dark‘s laptop gun. (Though, from what I understand, the omission of Half-Life 2‘s Gravity Gun is fairly egregious.)

Some of the commenters on the article suggest the Lancer from Gears of Wars should be included as well. Personally I disagree—there’s nothing particularly innovative or interesting about the weapon, except that it’s a machine gun with a chainsaw on it. We’ve had chainsaws and we’ve had machine guns in FPS games before. The Torque Bow is a bit more interesting, but I don’t really see how it’s significantly different from a missile launcher (except that it takes longer to fire, can’t heat-seek, and has a delay before it explodes).

Ultimately, I don’t think any of Gears of Wars‘s weapons were particularly ground-breaking in any way (or even overpowered), so I wouldn’t have included them on the list.

On a related note, it looks like the much-loved original Halo pistol is back for Halo 3—in looks, at least (the video is a leak and will probably be taken down by the time you click).