I don't know what pushed me over the edge.
Maybe it was playing Gun at an Activision preview event.
Perhaps it was the way my lower back positively sang operatic with burning pain as my father and I carried my nine hundred pound six-year-old Trinitron up three flights of stairs to my current apartment.
In any case, though I thought for a long time that I would resist the siren's call, I decided that I was going to take Microsoft up on their challenge to my wallet and enter the HD Era in preparation for the release of the 360.
So I headed down to Circuit City today and had a Long Talk with two fine, upstanding young gentlemen about high-definition displays.
Then I went home, and bought the one I liked the best on Amazon, where after coupon codes and no sales tax it ended up being about $300 cheaper. It's the Samsung 26" LN-R268W and I should have it within a week...
..gee, now all I need is about nine hundred dollars worth of cables and I'll be all set. Oh, and a brand new $100 A/V selector. Yikes.
It is a bit creepy how I lined right up and purchased the exact TV set that Microsoft wanted me to. They announced a marketing partnership with Samsung at the Game Developers' Conference in March; by April the 23" model of this TV had become the Official TV Set Of The Xbox 360.
If you go to a Best Buy or Wal-Mart or whatnot and see an Xbox 360 display, that's the TV that'll be hooked up to it. It lists for $999. (That's actually about what I paid for the 26" model, which lists for $1399, after a pretty massive Amazon discount.)
It should come in handy, though. With the current generation of game hardware, only certain games support high-definition video output, and even then it's often 420p only. But Xbox 360 games, at a minimum, will all support 720p.
My first job is to hunt down component cables for the PlayStation 2 and GameCube. The former should be easy – they're still sold in stores and I think I even saw one during the aforementioned Circuit City recon mission – but Nintendo's actually discontinued the GCN cables. In fact, they've even removed the component port from the hardware.
Luckily, I have a launch unit, and I'm a rabid game importer, so I'm perfectly comfortable ordering a Japanese cable (they're available in stores there) from National Console Support or somewhere.
Revolution won't have special HD features, but I imagine it'll at least have progressive scan...
