50 bucks of points and every cent is worth it.

Once you get your xbox on to xbox live you find plenty of content that you can download while there are demos that are free a lot of stuff on xbox costs you money. Like the Wii and there point card system Microsoft also has a point card system, but there is a lot more there to offer then just old school hits, it’s to bad that Microsoft point system can be a bit confusing. Unlike Nintendo were 1 cent equals 1 point, Microsoft is 8 cents equal 1 point. So if your ever wondering how much something costs in real money you have to divide everything by at least 80. Since there is a lot more content Microsoft did a wise thing in dividing there point cards into a 20 and 50 dollar for those who have there eyes on a of downloadable content.

How to use the point card.
Like Nintendo wii’s card the whole thing involves scratching the back of the card and then entering a code in the market place to redeem the points. A quick little moment to process and boom your given your points to go spend. But I warn you if you scratch to hard you can make it unreadable, unlike the wii which has a lot bigger text Microsofts points card have a little bit smaller text and it can be hard to read.

Now there are plenty of areas around the xbox market place to spin points on. First and foremost the xbox live arcade. This area lets you download arcade games and arcade game trails. The trails are free but depending on the game the cost can be 5-20 dollars. While there are a fare amount of crappy games there are some pretty good ones that can be picked up at a good price including Uno and TMNT the arcade game, which not only are fun to play online but only cost you 5 bucks each.

Next in the market place are also movies and TV shows. Movies unfortunately are only to rent and the price for a high definition rental can cost you 6 bucks for a one day rental. Well I should say it’s technically a two week rental but the 2nd you hit play the timer goes down to 24 hours. After that the license runs out and your better off just deleing it. The HD movies are pretty good but I hear blue rays better and I believe it. Besides what’s the deal with only letting me rent movies why can’t I buy movies.

The TV shows cost 2 bucks to download a SD show and 3 bucks to download HD. These are to own however and can be deleted and redownloaded. I have bought a few of the old 60’s star trek show in HD and got to say that the show looks good in HD. Not great but pretty good and it was worth the 3 bucks to see the trouble with tribbles in HD.

Next to that there is also the game add ons. These are bit different, some of them are complete waste like the god father cheat code scandal that happen with EA, nothing like paying money to unlock something that is all ready on the disc. But there are a few useful add ons and a lot of them do have trails. The choice to buy them depends on the game and how big a fan of it that you are. Play for hours on end and want something to boost it then buy an add on, only a casual fan then you might want to spend your 5 to 6 bucks downloading the extra stages on something else.

Navigation.
Navigating the shopping channel is pretty easy just go to the xbox live panel and there is a game store for the game downloads and a movie store for the movie downloads. Each store can be browsed easily by using the filters that are set in place. There is no search option which can be a bit of a disappointment but fortunately the filters like searching by genres make it go quick enough. Before each download begins a bar that tells how much points it costs and how much memory is shown and you click on the accept and the download begins. A nice feature for the large downloads is the ability to turn off the xbox and still have the downloads go on, all though the xbox still makes a good amount of noise while doing it.

Like Nintendo’s point system there is going to be plenty of cases were your going to have unused points after you do a lot of downloads and while the points stay on in your account you can’t do anything with them in till you buy more points, a real drag but that’s what goes on when you use a point system.

Final Recommendation.
Yeah I recommend using the Xbox live market place it has a lot of nifty things to down and games to play. The point system can be a bit confusing and some of the add ons aren’t to hot but it’s a nice place to shop and sometimes just browse for fun.