Having enjoyed Halo 1 and 2 on my PC it has long been my desire to find a way to play the Xbox exclusive remainder of the series. The only question was whether emulation would provide a route before the price of an Xbox 360 console itself fell below my threshold of pain. Well it turns out that emulation loses this time because this weekend I realised I could pick up an Xbox 360 console and a few games for around €50. Even if I do no more than play the few Halo Titles (3, 4, ODST and Reach) I will consider this a reasonable investment. I was actually offered a console for €35 but on investigation it was a version without hard disk so I opted to pay an extra €15 for a Xbox 360 "Slim" with 250Gb hard disk. We already own a Wii and a PS3 so that now makes a full house of seventh generation consoles for us. I bought the PS 3 a couple of years ago hoping to play a few exclusives but in the end I only finished "The Last of Us"(excellent game). The PS3 itself is still used daily as a netflix / Blue Ray player. One of the reasons I play so few games on the PS3 is because it is hooked up to the family TV and I never get exclusive use of it. Learning this lesson I have placed the Xbox 360 on top of my computer and hooked it up to my monitor. I need to manually switch between Display Port (computer) and HDMI (Xbox) but otherwise the arrangement works well. The field of view and screen resolution of the Xbox 360 are not really designed for close up viewing so I find I have to push my chair back a bit for best experience but overall it is a pretty good solution and I am already about two thirds of the way through Halo 3.
Minor observation I prefer the user interface of the 360 the the PS3 but I can't really say why. It is brighter and more colourful but it is also more intuitive I think.
