[Note: I wrote about this last night, but it disappeared into the bit bucket somewhere and *poof!* ;-)]
Son&Heir and I took a day off and headed north. Ended up barely avoiding re-enacting a minor subset of The Gift of the Magi by buying each others’ Christmas presents together. *heh*
Soooo… I bought him his “original” XBox (all $60 of it) and he bought me mine. We knew he had his eye on a $75 deal on one to go along with his Wii and XBox 360 and PS3 for whatever reason and thought that would be a reasonable addition to his Xmas list from us. What we didn’t know was that he had planned on buying two, modding them to be used as media servers and giving us one of them.
(Oh, you noticed the disparity between the $75 and the $60? Yep. Price wars. NOTE: not exactly “price wars”–see comments.)
So, I’m modding “his” and he’s modding “ours”.
Works. (He gets the six games that came with the two ‘Boxes.)
As it stands, I’m just getting up to speed on the modding process. Deciding between a strictly softmod or an all-out hard mod. The difference? About $100. For the hard mod, about $40 for a mod chip plus $40 for some peripheral hardware, plus $60 for a new hard drive.
For a softmod, just about $40 for some interface hardware to easily transfer some setup files from my PC to the XBox–the rest of the stuff is either free (all free software) or already in Son&Heir’s possession (lil hardware stuff). Heck, maybe another $10 for a USB-to-PS/2 “Y” adapter for using a nice lil wireless keyboard/mouse combo I semi-retired a while back (the mouse felt a tad klunky in my hand).
Then, yeh, I’d probably change out the hard drive for a larger one. The reason I’d consider chipping the thing is that I could add a MUCH larger hard drive were I to do that. So, I may softmod it and then chip it later. That’d work. Heck, once I figure the best streaming solution from my computer with the TV card, I’d certainly want a larger hard drive to store DVR stuff, but not over 200GiB. If I needed more storage than that, I’d just burn a DVD or three.
Speaking of… Ripped the Jackie Chan/Jet Li “The Forbidden Kingdom” DVD the other day, cos the rental was up and Son&Heir wanted a look at it (yeh, the copy’s destroyed now–I think; that was the plan, at least). I’d just have kept it over and paid the late fee, but… small town, small video rental place, and apparently the vid’s really pouplar, so I took it back on time. Anywho, it’s a DVD I may well buy. The wire-fu scenes with the Monkey King, and the scene with Let Li and Jackie Chan going at each other are really, really good “choreography”. Fun. Heck, the stuff that’s not fly-by-wire-fu in those scenes is even better than the wire fu. The plot’s nothing. Characterization’s so-so (Jackie’s always fun, and Jet Li gets to play some fun parts in this one, but character development? In a Jackie Chan movie? Fuggetaboutit! *heh*). Nah. This is all about the “choreography” and the camera work. Fun movie.
Bad part? No out takes normally found in Jackie Chan movies. Bummer. Oh, well. Can’t have everything. This at least had Jackie Chan and Jet Li in the same flick.
Thanks for the movie review. I’ve generally liked Jet Li’s movies, although some of the “wire-fu” really just leaves me wondering “why?”.
I’ve also enjoyed Jackie Chan movies too, but just can’t seem to get myself in the mood to watch his “Rush Hour” movies with Chris Rock.
This one I might just buy. I never rent the things — too many problems with the rental companies, including lazy people behind the counter putting the movies back on the shelf an not bothering to actually check them in. I got hit with a considerable “late fee and movie replacement” fee at Hollywood Video once — for a movie I had turned in several months earlier. They sent a collection agency after me. I complained, saying I had returned it a long time ago. They said they had no record of it. I personally told the manager to cancel my account and suddenly they “found” the movie — on the shelf.
Since then I have made it a personal policy to NEVER rent a movie from anyone.
NOTE: correction on original XBox pricing. Originally, at the place these were bought, one console alone (no controllers or games) was $50. I understood from one source that there was a $75 bundle deal. We got a $60 bundle deal. Any one of the pricings would have been fair for the available products, IMO. A little too high for just a 733mhz computer w/64MB RAM and an 8GiB HDD, but for such a computer with the features of the XBox included, not bad.
Bummer experience with movie rentals, Perri. Local place has its weaknesses (smaller than “big boys” selection and only a few “deep”–if you’re not on the list for renting one of the–maybe-THREE copies of a new DVD, you’re oput of luck for a few weeks on new issues), but at least I know where the owner lives. 🙂 And since he and his (very few) employees know the store’s clientele pretty well, things like what you describe just do not happen.
I once forgot to return a DVD (lotsa emergency health stuff going on w/my Wonder Woman) and my neighbor (on of the good ones) handled it. Well, she works there anyway, so…
(Another employee lends a certain interesting international flavor. Moldavian green carder, studying for citizenship exam–has it down, just needs to buck up and take the thing, IMO).
Small towns have their advantages to offset some of the disadvantages.
Re: Rush Hour movies. Enjoyed #1 whenever Chris Rock’s mouth was shut, which was not nearly as often as it should have been. That whiny stuff coming out of his pie hole is just annoying as all get out.