I realized quite late in the game (pun intended) how cool the console gaming is vs gaming on the PC. For years, ever since the early Doom days I’ve been gaming on a PC. But then the graphics cards’ prices increased so much that I could usually buy the whole console for the price of a mid-class 3D card.

I got my Xbox at the very end of 2004. It was holiday season, Halo 2 just got out with rave reviews around the ‘net… My wife and I were walking around Carrefour (very roughly speaking an European equivalent of Wal-Mart) shopping groceries and discussing Christmas/New Year presents. It was actually her that suggested that I buy myself an Xbox. On a whim, something I rarely do when electronics are in question, I just put one in the trolley.

Couple of months later I was pleasantly surprised how good the decision was and have never looked back – I’m a “console guy” now.

Jumping in so late has its advantages – there were plenty of games to choose from and most were cheap (launched months ago). The platform was already mature so new games coming out would often use the hardware to its maximum.

When Xbox 360 launched, I did not rush to buy one. I still had almost dozen games to play on my “old” Xbox and I knew that buying a revision 1 hardware was never good idea anyway, so I waited. I also saw the games running on a HDTV LCD and decided to only go with the next-gen console with the next-gen TV.

Finally the starts aligned – in the next couple of weeks, I am getting a new LCD TV, a new PC (with a relatively low end graphics card, just enough to run Vista ) and a shiny new Xbox 360 (ordered it yesterday).

I got a great deal. Xbox 360 Premium with the best game so far “Gears of War” is only 434€. Since the console is officially 399€ that means I get the game for only 35€ (retail price usually around 60€!). On top of this, I get 50€ coupon from Microsoft (trivially easy to cash in) and a 40€ voucher from Amazon. The Amazon voucher sucks for general public because you only have 30 days to use it, you must buy over 80€ worth of goods from Amazon to cash it in, but I’m buying a new monitor on Amazon anyway so for me it’s a non-issue. Microsoft’s coupon is a lot better deal – you don’t have to buy anything extra, you have several months to cash it in and they will put the money on your account directly.

So let’s see – with 90€ discount, I get my console for 309€! On top of that, I save 25€ on the best game for the Xbox 360 until now.

I’d say it’s hard to pass this up, especially in the light of the new 1 year warranty for the console (US only for now, but should trickle down to Europe soon hopefully).

I’ll post a couple of pictures when I get the new TV. Unless I change my mind at the last moment, I’m going for 32” Samsung LCD TV LE32R73BD.