For various reasons, after using computers (and playing computer games) for 20 years now, I have finally decided to give in and buy a game console. Perhaps the main reason is that I’m fed up with the constant upgrades that are required in order to be able to enjoy the latest PC games. The console hardware only changes when a new version is released every 5 years or so, and in the mean time all games written for this console can be expected to perform well and take advantage of all the available features that the hardware offers. Individual games don’t have to be tweaked in order to run well on the particular hardware, as is often the case with PC games and certain video cards.
Another enabling factor is the fact that I have a kids now, which means that I rarely have more than 30 minutes at a time to spare. While I used to love highly immersive games such as RPGs or even MMRPGs, which are generally better on PCs, I now tend to favor more action-oriented games, which provide more immediate gratification. Plenty of those games exist on the current generation consoles. Even better, it looks like there’s a fair amount of good RPGs and adventure games. While the complexity of these games may not quite be the same as on the PC, I’m sure it will be good enough.
After looking at the differences between the Xbox and the Playstation (I’m not an expert on either, since I pretty much ignored this market up to now), I decided to go with the Xbox, which appears to be a higher-end machine. Of course, this adds another hackable machine to my household (in addition to the TiVo, which I already hacked a few months ago). :)
Here are some Xbox modding notes on my Wiki.