I loved the Blades dashboard. Something about idly pressing the shoulder buttons to flip through the blades while talking to my friend with that goofy wireless "Xbox communicator" on my ear.
Best Xbox console. It had pretty good games. Sad they were unable to keep that momentum going and are basically nope’ing from the console business altogether now.
I was able pull together a Halo 3 LAN party last year, although the "consoles" were Linux PCs and the game was the MCC edition (60fps instead 30). Split-screen was resurrected via mods. I bought some Microsoft gamepad receiver to bring Xbox 360 original controllers under Linux. Some people insisted they get to play on the original gamepad (otherwise it was a mixed bag of PlayStation and newer Xbox/PC controllers).
I also realized that Halo 3 itself would have been old enough to drink with us!
I don't know if the Altair 8800 would count as my first home computer, as I was too young to really understand what it was and mostly just liked to play with the paper tape feed on the Teletype attached to it. By the time we got the PET 2001, I was old enough to actually use it as intended.
What's the deal with the audio delay showing up for button taps until the icons have loaded?