Friday night I was finally able to track down an Xbox Live Vision camera.

Microsoft’s been having some real distribution problems with these things, at least in southern California anyway.

They were supposed to hit retail last Tuesday, but nearly a week later every Best Buy, Target, Toys-R-Us, and Wal-Mart within like a 30 mile radius of my zip code still haven’t received their first shipments. Best Buy told me they’re actually not expecting them until the end of October.

I was finally able to find an EBGames near my house with one in stock and I nabbed it after work on Friday. (They had received a grand total of five.)

It’s a pretty neat little gizmo, that’s for sure. With in-game voice chat being all the rage over the past few years I found myself wondering why in-game video chat took so long to happen.

The console has built-in one-on-one video chat, and the quality’s not too shabby:

Uno is a neat use of the camera, and it’s hard to find an open game where at least one person doesn’t have one. So far I haven’t seen any man-ass mooning incidents, and for that I am grateful. Luckily there’s a way to report disruptive users!

When I bought the camera it came with codes to unlock the full versions of Uno and Robotron: 2084.

I already bought Uno and you’d have to have downs syndrome to enjoy Robotron, so I’m giving away the codes to unlock those games to the first person to contact me. The only catch is that you have to give me your Xbox Live username so I know you’re not just going to turn around and sell these on ebay!

Uno and Robotron are normally $5 each, so this saves you $10!