Vista night launch event: pass on the football player, score on wireless controlling

We just got back from our local midnight Vista launch event. Despite the event being "for" Philadelphia, it was actually held at a Circuit City just across the state line here in Delaware. Apparently it's a really busy store. They had some dubious music and actual food (hamburgers and some cheese-steak looking items) outside, with a line waiting until 10 p.m. to enter the store.

So we got in, I got annoyed at being passed over for the lanyard with a code for a Vista Ultimate drawing and a Vista/HP USB key (size and speed unknown), and we sort of wondered what to do next.

There was some Vista demoing going on, but not much gaming related. Our local celebrity - Randall Cunningham - came in about 40 minutes later, apparently not quite sober/there/with it. It's sad when people line up to take pictures with a celebrity, he comes in, and people don't even realize who it is and have to whip out little football cards to compare mug shots.

We were not going to wait until midnight to buy boxed copies of Vista or new laptops, or hang around for those drawings that the Circuit City people actually knew enough about to realize that people had to be there to win. As such, the evening might have been a wash. But I spotted an interesting sight. A young fellow was playing some sort of football game. On a laptop. With an Xbox 360 controller. The wireless one. Hmm. Let's take a closer look.

The mouse looking peripheral, of course, being the Xbox 360 wireless gaming receiver for Windows. I had never personally seen one, so off I went to inquire about it. I managed to talk to three different Microsoft guys - an Xbox 360 one working on the kiosk (it wasn't overheated), a Windows one, and I think another Windows one. All of them super friendly, and they certainly showered us with more freebies that the rest of the event. Interestingly none of them knew for sure about the receiver, which made me wonder who exactly brought it in. One of the fellows seemed to think it would be out in March, although both Amazon and GameSpot list it as shipping on February 6. I was actually surprised how small the receiver was. For $19.99 it's certainly a no-brainer gaming accessory for Vista. The football playing youth didn't seem to have any problems with the controller connection to the laptop, so the thing seems to work pretty well. Hopefully it will hit stores soon, so we can all play the upcoming Geometry Wars for Vista.