More on the Elite

As far as peripherals go, I now have 3 wireless controllers and battery packs for each, a charge-and-play kit that came with my bundle, and I've since bought a separate battery charger that plugs into the wall.

Basically, it takes about 6 hours to fully charge a battery with the charge and play kit. The problem is that I normal don't leave my consoles on for 6 hours at a time, so any time we were playing 2 players, the second player was "wired" to the console.

The battery charger is independent of the console, obviously. I can plug two batteries at a time into it, and all my batteries were charged in less than 2 hours (none needed a full charge, though). The battery packs are supposed to give about 25 hours of playtime. I should be able to juggle the controllers so that all batteries don't wear out at the same time, but I can always plug in AA batteries if that situation occurs. From my perspective, battery packs and the charger pay for themselves in the long run, especially if you buy used (which I did).

I've played all of my games now. I've earned 90 whole achievement points (75 in Fuzion Frenzy and 15 in Hexic - an arcade game that came loaded on my hard drive)! I have one friend with well over 10,000. I've got a lot of gaming to do to catch up, LOL. The achievement points are a neat little extra to keep you playing games, if you're a bit OCD like me. Plus, it will get me to play games I wouldn't normally try, or stick with games a little longer than usual. The Dashboard will even tell me how many achievements are in every game I've played and how many I've earned. That's a nice touch.

Speaking of stuff on my hard drive, it came loaded with 3 demos and about 8 videos. Some are movie previews, and some are game videos. I've also downloaded a half-dozen or so free trailers and videos from the Marketplace. In addition, I downloaded the Forza 2 demo. A neat feature is that while the Forza demo was downloading, I was able to go play some games. In the middle of my game, a little message popped up telling me my download was complete.

I know it sounds simple, but the biggest difference, other than all of the bells, whistles, and conveniences I've mentioned, is the HD graphics. As you'd might expect, it's exactly like when you went from watching SD TV to HD TV. I suppose I should've expected that, but it really surprised me when I saw it first-hand. Even the cartoon-like games, like Fuzion Frenzy, really look nice, let alone games like MLB 2K7.

Forgive me for the rambling style - I'm just kind of typing as I think here. I've got a lot going on with work, sports, and so forth, so I haven't really properly written my last couple of posts.