entirely safe and fun

Much prettier to look at than Metallica themselves, honestly

The XBox 360 ships with a highly non-trivial music visualization application, called Neon, built by category captains Llamasoft. It is sufficiently non-trivial, in fact, that it has a manual. I was surprised when I grabbed my controller and the graphics seemed to be changing in response to my joystick maneuvers, and then really just kind of bemused. Now I’m enjoying it - it’s a little bonus game, in effect, which happens to showcase 360’s ability to maintain a steady frame rate at any resolution, and to give additional weight to the 360’s ability to read music files (in a somewhat disappointly narrow range of formats, which sadly does not include FLAC) from its LAN-mates.

All it needs now is to expose its web browser functionality — I would not be unhappy to see a third-party browser, either — to be the very best device ever to wear the “set-top box” tag.