After waiting and waiting, I finally obtained an import Xbox 360 unit about two weeks ago

So far I only have 4 games: Condemned, Ridge Racer 6, Dead or Alive 4, and Wrestle Kingdom.

Both Condemned and Ridge Racer 6 are the U.S. versions of those games, unfortunately the post-launch copies of Ridge Racer 6 are region-protected so the game won' t be playable until I get a U.S. 360 unit down the line. No biggie.

Reason I took a chance on the U.S. copies of those two games was because my 360 arrived totally unexpected on a Friday, leaving me with absolutely no time to place an order and get a game in time for the weekend. So, getting a peek at a posted list of U.S. 360 games that weren' t region-protected I headed down to one of the local game stores and snagged those two games. The NCS list did also note that later versions of Ridge Racer 6 *might* be region-protected so I basically took a chance on the game, hoping for the best, knowing that it was a gamble.

With that said I' ve only played Dead or Alive 4 and Wrestle Kingdom. Dead or Alive 4 is a beautiful game I must say. Looks damn good and plays just as well.
Wrestle Kingdom didn' t turn out as good.. While the game looks pretty good with great looking grapplers and animated fans, the gameplay is a bit underwhelming. There just doesn' t seem to be a lot of wrestling moves in the game, especially compared to Yuke' s other wrestling game offerings.

I was on the fence about Xbox Live since I' m a solitary gamer, but I finally bit the bullet one night and signed up for three months. Registration was pretty easy, in fact, the only disappointing part was that, no matter how hard I tried I couldn' t get the username I really wanted. But other than that I must say that it' s an interesting service. The biggest appeal of the service to me right now are the downloadable demos. Checked out Project Gotham City, and 5 minutes later that game was wiped from the hard drive after enduring one of the races. The best part about the game was probably seeing Commisioner Gordan among the crowds in the backgrounds.

I did get a chance to play a few Dead or Alive matches online and it was interesting. Won 2 matches and Lost about 998 times. The lag was INCREDIBLE while watching the first match. there was one point in the game where the lag literally brought the action to a crawl. Fortunately my matches were a lot smoother than that and the lag wasn' t as insane. Those headsets must be of pretty poor quality since everyone I heard chatting during the game sounded so tinny, OR is it
the audio conversion and not the headsets themselves? I haven' t tried the headsets, don' t really think I' m ever going to (who knows), but I' m curious as to whether much better quality headsets would yield better results?

Wrestle Kingdom fared MUCH MUCH better online. Played against someone residing in Taiwan and there was virtually ZERO lag - at least from what I noticed. But then again it was 3 am in the morning and the internet/online world isn' t as congested.