Hundreds of video game junkies lined up in the early morning hours to get their hands on the Xbox360. What's so great about it?

There are few things in life that people will wait for in line at 8 a.m. on a rainy morning -- and fortunately for Microsoft, one of those things is the company's newest video game system, the Xbox 360, the sequel to the wildly popular Xbox console.\nNearly 200 gamers queued more than 30 hours outside of a Best Buy in Manhattan for an Xbox 360 on Nov. 22, the system's launch date. And the Big Apple wasn't the only city to see Microsoft's brainchild fly off its shelves.\n"We had about thirty, all were pre-ordered," said Stephanie Conklin, a sales associate at Electronics Boutique at College Mall. "We went through about half of them on the midnight opening. We limited it to one per person. They went out fast."\nRetailing for about $400 (a price overshadowed the $2000 tag on some that sold on eBay), the 360 has benefits that make it an improvement in nearly all areas over its predecessor. The "Premium Package" includes three CPUs ("It makes for awesome graphics," Conklin says), wireless controllers and a built-in DVD player, for starters. Its 200GB hard drive allows for backwards compatibility, giving the gamer the opportunity to play older titles that were released for the standard Xbox. All this, along with its ability to store pictures and music, makes it easy to see why people are so eager to get their hands on the multi-faceted video game system.\nA "Core Package" of the 360 is also available and retails for $100 less, but has fewer perks, featuring among other things, wired controllers and an absent hard drive.\n"People won't feel like they're throwing away $400," Conklin says, on why someone should upgrade to the Premium.\nAlthough Xbox fans can expect everything they came to love with the original and more, they might also run into unanticipated hardware quirks. Some players have already experienced the system crashing or freezing, after only about an hour or two of play. Microsoft says technical support is offered with the Xbox's own hotline (1-800-4MY-XBOX), and offers to repair or replace any faulty console.\nThe 360 is the first of the "big three" gaming companies' next generation systems to be released. Nintendo's Revolution and Sony's Playstation 3 will launch in the coming year, giving the Xbox some competition in the arena of cutting-edge gaming.\nWith these new standards being set with these next-gen systems, video game fans are going to be frothing to get their hands on the next two, just as they were with the Xbox 360. Conklin says this is just the tip of the gaming craze iceberg.\n"We've had a lot of people coming in and asking questions about the next-gen systems already," she says. "And I think they're going to be even better than the 360, so be ready."\nIf Sony and Nintendo have as fervent of a following as Microsoft, Conklin might have to take her own advice.