So I headed over to a buddy's house the day after Thanksgiving to check out ye olde X-Box.

Here's a few observations:
• It's big. We are talking decent sized VCR big.
• The controllers are big. Not just Sega Dreamcast big but club someone to death big.
  • For being big the controllers aren't half bad. The dual analog sticks and the analog shoulder buttons work quite well and are comfortable.
  • The regular buttons are at the wrong angle. Rather than being more or less horizontal across the controller they are closer to vertical. This makes it very difficult to play fighting games properly. It also means you hit the wrong button far more often than you would on a Playstation, Playstation2, Saturn, Dreamcast, Super Nintendo, or prettty much any other console.
  • The controllers have two memory card slots in them ala Dreamcast. This contributes to the bulk of the controller. Note: you don't need a memory card at all unless you take your saved games with you or trade saved games since there's a hard drive in the X-Box.
  • There's a gigantic, circular, fugly X-Box logo thing in the middle of the controller. I can't decide if it is more gaudy or gauche.
• It doesn't seem to be all that loud as compared to a Dreamcast when running. This is a good thing.
• It can and does suffer from slowdown. I think in some cases this is due to the Pentium III 733 processor. Heck, my laptop has a faster processor than that. It isn't as if the P3 is exactly optimized for a dedicated console type device either.
• Some of the slowdown is definitely from the hard drive. You can hear it loading up cached data from the hard drive on occasion. I'd guess that much of this is due to poor coding by not ram caching whenever possible. This could also be due in part to the distinct lack of ram present in the X-Box as compared to a PC. Waiting 2 seconds for a portrait to load in Dead or Alive 3 is pathetic. That's what happens when you use slow-ass, cheap 5400RPM hard drives.
• Each game I've seen on X-Box doesn't have any anti-aliasing. Supposedly the nvidia graphics core can do anti-aliasing with minimal performance loss but I haven't seen any games taking advantage of it. Is it a case of dev kits that lacked the aa feature or is there more of a performance hit than nvidia has disclosed?
• In spite of these flaws the X-Box games look good. Dead or Alive 3 looks darn good. This is probably the first fighting game that is truly a step beyond Dreamcast's Soul Calibur in terms of graphics.

All in all the X-Box is pretty cool. What it does provide is more ram and a better video processor than any other console out there. That means that once the developers like Capcom, Sega, Konami, Namco, and others start to write the close to the metal code we should see some amazing games. Until then we should see a number of competent but unspectacular games from PC game companies and second tier developers. Right now there isn't a single must-own game on the system for me. I'll wait until something like the new Panzer Dragoon comes out before I buy one I think.