Editor’s note: This article has been floating around in our archives for a while.  It was never actually published (in its original, 2-page form) due to technical limitations.  However, I have decided to publish it, even though it’s a bit dated (for computers and game systems, 4 months is OLD), because it’s a fine piece and it gives UnnDunn his due. -A

So it begins

Tuesday November 22, 2005, 12:50am. It’s late, but even at this hour, the ubiquitous yellow cabs zoom up Fifth Avenue. I don’t notice; I’m too cold, wet, hungry and tired to notice. Indeed, I’ve been waiting in line for over thirteen hours now, seven of them under a light but nonstop freezing drizzle that has thoroughly drenched everything and everyone present. Umbrellas at this point are useless; water bounces off others’ umbrellas into my face anyway. My trusty backpack, worn from years of use and soaked from the rain, guards my camping supplies – a PSP, some magazines and other assorted odds and ends – but who knows the state of the items inside; they are most likely completely wet through as well. They were stowed at the first hint of rain, and they have not been removed since.

But I don’t care. I’m too excited to care; I’m next in line to enter Best Buy on 44th Street and 5th Avenue in New York City, where I and just over 160 other people will buy our Xbox 360s – some of the first Xbox 360s to be sold at retail in the entire world. Finally, the yellow-jacketed Best Buy doorman beckons me to enter. It’s warm inside. And dry. And clean. I made a beeline for the cash registers, fending off the sales-drones offering to sell me everything from wireless networking gear to extra faceplates. I’m here for one thing and one thing only.

Five minutes and $438 later, I am walking out of the store with an Xbox 360 in a white box double-bagged in my hands. The walk to the subway train that would take me home is interminable.

Introducing the Xbox 360

So the Xbox 360 is here. After months of waiting and speculation, weeks of hype and hours of freezing in the rain, the Xbox 360 is finally here. It’s a videogame console, but what a console it is. As the first next generation videogame console to be released, Xbox 360 represents a significant leap forward in technology for the industry, a leap which is mostly expressed through the console’s emphasis on high-definition displays and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. Indeed, this console is almost held back when played on a standard TV set; it almost seems as if you are playing on a standard Xbox.

Xbox 360 also makes big improvements in its online gaming support. Microsoft’s Xbox Live gaming service is integrated throughout the Xbox 360 and boasts several new features designed to provide better online game play experiences, tighter community features and greatly expanded online content delivery. Xbox 360 is also a media powerhouse, capable of accessing and displaying media from a variety of sources and in a variety of formats. It features Windows Media Center Extender support, and it can go online to get music and video from Microsoft’s online service.

Finally, the whole package is customizable, with consumers able to personalize many aspects of the experience to their own tastes.

With the PlayStation 3 looming on the horizon, Microsoft has a lot to do to carve out a significant user base for itself as quickly as possible, and it all starts with this machine. Let’s take a look

Opening the Box

The Xbox 360 is a Microsoft console, but you could be forgiven for believing otherwise. From the very beginning, Microsoft has gone out of its way to give this device a decidedly un-Microsoft-like personality. Gone is the big, tough, black behemoth that was the Xbox. Instead we have a sleek, white, curvy console with gentle concave surfaces designed to evoke ‘the concept of an inhale.’ Chrome accents on the disc tray and hard drive add tasteful decoration to the white, while the green “ring of light” status indicator offers perhaps the console’s only nod to “high-tech.” All of the front-mounted ports are covered with retractable flaps, helping maintain the console’s smooth front face, unblemished by gaping holes.

Even opening the box is an experience in high-style. The box design itself is minimalist, with green, loosely concentric circles adorning a plain white box. Opening it reveals the console with all the associated accessories neatly packed inside color-coded bags. The accessories include a wireless controller, media remote, 20 GB hard drive, HD cables and an Ethernet cable. Thoughtfully, Microsoft also included batteries for the wireless controller and media remote.

Taking the console out, one is surprised by just how heavy it is. Despite the console’s slimmed-down profile, it packs some serious heft. It’s not quite as heavy as Microsoft’s previous black beast, but it is close. The included power brick, required for operation of the console, is gargantuan and easily accounts for the console’s reduction in volume and weight over the original Xbox.

Fortunately, the console feels solid and substantial. It doesn’t feel cheap in the slightest. The hinged doors for the memory card slots and USB connectors feel solid, and the power connector is a huge thing which locks in using spring-loaded clips. The HD cable feels similarly tough. Having said that, it would have been nicer if the console was a little lighter, and the power brick with its two-piece power cable is OK if you are going to plug it in and forget about it, but it is far too unwieldy if you plan to move the console around (for example, to take it to a friend’s house for some LAN action.)

A console is nothing without its controller, and a controller is nothing if it doesn’t fit comfortably in the hands and provide easy access to all the controls it offers. Thankfully, the Xbox 360’s official controller scores on both points. Based on the Xbox Controller S, the new controller retains its predecessor’s size, general shape and primary button layout. However, it manages to make improvements in all the right places. It is lighter than the previous controller, with a more comfortable shape that fits in average-sized hands better. The major changes are a lot more common-sense. Microsoft has done away with the black and white buttons of the previous controller, replacing them with shoulder buttons placed above the triggers.  They have also moved the Start and Back buttons to flank the middle of the controller. These are extremely welcome changes. Also, they’ve done away with the memory card slots and added a headset jack facing the player, replacing the controller-mounted headset ‘puck’ from the current-generation Xbox.

By far the biggest change is the addition of the Xbox Guide button right in the middle of the controller, with a Ring of Light surrounding it. This button is integral to the Xbox 360 experience, and serves a number of functions. At once its most and least important function is to turn the console on… which is our next step.

Turning it On

Videogame consoles are some of the most advanced pieces of consumer technology ever sold, but despite this, they have thus far not adopted simple consumer electronics conventions; like using a remote to turn on the system. Until now. Pressing the Guide button on the controller (wireless or wired) causes the console to turn on, playing a funky animation and flashing the ring of light on both the console and the controller. A few seconds later after setting up your system, you’re in.

The first thing that struck me about the interface was how deceptively simple it is. The Dashboard is split into four main sections, devoted to Xbox Live, Games, Media and Settings. Most of the screens are further split into two sections, the left side displaying your Gamercard (more about that later) and a menu, and the right side used for advertising and peripheral information. Pressing the Guide button causes a secondary ‘Guide’ to fly out of the left side of the screen, giving access to additional player-specific options.

Even though the Dashboard and Guide screens are easy to read, understand and navigate, it can often be difficult to find the specific option you want. This is because many of the more useful options are buried several screens down. For example, listening to an audio track from the hard drive requires you to navigate to the Media tab, select Music, select the hard drive, select Albums, choose an album, select the song, and finally hit Play. Each one of those steps brings up a new screen that must be read and understood before continuing. Microsoft could definitely have done better in this regard.

A key feature to talk about is the “universal sign-in.” Games on current generation consoles all implement their own individual schemes for tracking different players. Most games make you create a profile before you start playing, and automatically save all information to your profile. With Xbox 360, that process has been taken over by the system. When you first set up your Xbox 360 console, you are given the option to create a Profile, similar to a user account in modern operating systems. When you turn on the console, the first thing you should do is sign in to your Profile. This is indicated by a ‘Gamercard’ at the top left corner of the Dashboard. The Gamercard indicates who is signed in, shows their Gamerpicture, Gamerscore, Gamerzone and Rep or Achievements. More about all of those later. Once you’ve signed in, all of your games will recognize you and automatically load your game-specific information. Your profile is tied to your Xbox Live account, and also stores your console settings including personal themes, game defaults, and so on. This is definitely a welcome feature, if only because it gets you in the game quicker, and its implementation is nearly perfect.

Entering the Game

The heart of the Xbox 360 is of course all about games, and it predictably delivers visuals and sound that are a noticeable step forward over current-generation consoles. The launch game of choice for this author is Project Gotham Racing 3, which is actually the fourth game in Bizarre Creations’ long-running Kudos racing franchise (the first was Metropolis Street Racer on the now defunct Dreamcast console.)

To be frank, aside from the requisite graphical and sonic upgrades, the launch games really don’t do anything special. It would be a fair criticism to claim that these are merely the same games we get with the current-generation consoles, except with better graphics. This is certainly the case with the games I have played. Settling in with Project Gotham Racing 3, it all felt very familiar. I was doing the same kinds of things I had done with its predecessor on Xbox. The graphics did look nice, with richly detailed cars and cities (each car is rendered with over 90,000 polygons) and playing on a high definition display really did bring out incredible details.

The Xbox 360 does bring some new tricks to the table, though, and they all center on the ever-present Xbox Guide, accessible by pressing the aforementioned Guide button in the center of the controller. The guide allows you to quickly view your profile including your Achievements. Achievements are little badges awarded by the games you play when you reach certain milestones. Each achievement is worth a certain number of Gamerpoints commensurate with its difficulty level. Every retail Xbox 360 game can award up to 1000 points, split across at least 5 achievements. The Achievements and points are nothing more than a badge of honor; an excuse for bragging rights. But they are a cool addition nonetheless; they bring back the idea of a high score.

The guide also lets you play music alongside your game. Longtime Xbox gamers may remember that certain games allowed you to play custom soundtracks from music stored on the hard drive. Now with Xbox 360, that feature has been moved to the guide, where at any time, you can browse your music collection (be it on the hard drive or streamed from a PC or portable device) and play some tracks, without leaving the game. The game will also mute its own music for you, so there are no conflicts.

Taking it Online

But perhaps the Guide’s biggest strength is the way it keeps you connected to Xbox Live, Microsoft’s seminal gaming service.  For the Xbox 360, Xbox Live has received a bit of a revamp, making it a pervasive part of the Xbox 360 experience.

Coupled with the universal sign-in feature, everything you do on your Xbox 360 console can have an impact online, whether you are in single player mode or not. While you are logged in, you will see on-screen Alert messages telling you when a friend comes online, when you receive a message or a game invite, and so on. In addition, any Achievements you receive will be posted online for all to view. Anyone can see what you are doing on your console; whether you are playing a game, downloading content from the marketplace or just watching a DVD. It will even show what level of the game you are on. Fortunately, the system incorporates extensive privacy options, so you can block much of that information from being viewed by people you don’t know.

Community features have also been beefed up. There is now a universal messaging system, which allows players to send text or short (15 second) voice messages. Of course, the friends list is back, as is voice chat. Interestingly though, instead of having multiparty voice chat, there is the ability to create up to four one-on-one chat channels with other players, similar to some sort of four-way call waiting system. You can switch between each channel at will, but you can only have one other person per channel at the other end. Also, the voice chat channels will not be interrupted until you close them. You can launch games, quit games, watch movies, listen to music, whatever, and the voice chat session will not be interrupted. Definitely a cool feature.

New to Xbox Live on 360 is a comprehensive downloadable content directory, called the Xbox Live Marketplace. This builds on the downloadable content feature of the previous Xbox by putting all of the content in one centralized directory and expanding on its scope. Now it doesn’t just include game content, it also includes game and movie trailers, Dashboard themes, Gamerpicture and more. Much of it is free, but most of it costs money in the form of “Microsoft Points.” Microsoft Points (not to be confused with gamer points) can be purchased directly on the 360 via credit card or they can be bought in stores on pre-paid cards. The points are used to pay for certain content on Xbox Live Marketplace, but Microsoft says it will expand the Points program to be used for several other Microsoft online services in the future.

Downloading itself is a bit of a mixed bag. Downloads routinely crawl along at an almost glacial pace given the speed of the connection. And while you are downloading, you cannot do anything else on the console. You can’t even bring up the guide because it’s already up. Fortunately, you can quit a download and resume it later, but for larger downloads such as movie trailers or demos, chances are you are just going to have to walk away and do something else for a half-hour. The content is worth it most of the time, with yummy movie trailers in 720p and even-yummier game demos posted on a regular basis.

Of course, this is all secondary to the actual business of Xbox Live, which is online competition, and here too the service has seen some improvements. Chief among them is the TrueSkill matchmaking system. This system tries to pair gamers with each other based similar skill ratings. Skill ratings are similar to Chess ratings, but the algorithm takes into account your win-loss records and the number of games you’ve played. The system works amazingly well; the vast majority of my TrueSkill-matched games in PGR3 have been extremely competitive, with no-one disappearing into the distance, never to be seen again. The system only requires five or six games to accurately gauge your skill level too, so you’ll be getting into competitive matches in no time.

Another new Xbox Live feature is designed to reduce the impact greifers will have on the service. Every Xbox Live player has two properties that help determine who he gets to play; his Reputation and his Gamerzone. The Gamerzone is set by the player, and indicates what kind of player he is. There are four Zones; Underground for trash-talking hardcore players, Pro for players who are out to win, Recreation for players who just want a fun time in a friendly environment, and Family for younger players.

The Reputation is a rating of the player’s behavior on Xbox Live, as indicated by people he has played against. When you play against someone, you will have the opportunity to leave feedback about that player, in the form of a thumbs-up or down. If you Prefer a player, the system will try to match you up with that person more often, and will increase that person’s Rep. If you Avoid someone, the system will try to make sure you never see that person again, and will reduce that person’s Rep. The TrueSkill system will also do all it can to match players who are in the same Zone and have similar Rep ratings. This means the good players will only play other good players, and the greifers will be left in their own space amongst themselves. It’s a clever system, and it works very well.

Other Media

Of course, you can’t play games all the time (or so my father tells me) and the Xbox 360 has some features for when the game is over. It can serve as a capable media client and DVD player as well.

As a DVD player, it’s rather unremarkable. It does progressive scan, but it doesn’t upscale your DVDs to 720p or 1080i. You’ll take your 480p playback and you’ll like it. Unlike with Xbox, DVD playback is available right out of the box, and you can use either the controller or the included media remote to control playback. And thankfully, this time the remote can also be used to open and close the disc tray and turn the machine on or off, perfect for watching that late-night rental movie while dozing off to sleep.

As a media player, the Xbox 360 is a bit of a mixed bag. On the plus side, the console is capable of getting music and photos from a wide range of portable devices via its 3 USB 2.0 ports, and from a networked Windows XP PC. Setting up a portable device is as easy as plugging it in, but setting up a networked PC is a little more complicated. Microsoft has provided some tools to help smooth the process, but it will still require some effort and time on your part, along with perhaps a little head-scratching. It should be noted that the Xbox 360 cannot copy files off external devices; it can only stream the content from them. If you disconnect the external device, the content will disappear.

You can also rip music from audio CDs directly to the Xbox 360’s hard drive. Any standard audio CD will work, and if you are connected to Xbox Live, the system will even retrieve the CD information from AMG for you, saving you the hassle of having to manually type in all the names using the Xbox 360 controller.

Music playback is fairly mundane, with all the basic playback controls present and accounted for, but with little else. For a bit of flair, Microsoft threw in some very colorful and psychedelic visualization by Jeff Minter of Tempest fame. You can make the visualization full-screen, and you can control certain elements of them using the controller. The novelty of this wears off within minutes, however.

More importantly, your music will continue to play even if you leave the Music player. You can continue to explore the Dashboard and even engage in voice chats with the music never stopping. This comes in useful for browsing pictures on the Xbox 360, where you can easily run a slideshow of all the pictures in a folder while playing music. The slideshow options are nonexistent, however. Your pictures will change every five seconds with a cross-fade and a Ken Burns style push or pull on each picture. Don’t like it? Tough noogies. Having said that, pictures do look spectacular in high-def.

Navigating through your music or picture collection is quite easy, if a little cumbersome and slightly disjointed. Creating play lists is way too complicated, and play lists with external content cannot be saved, limiting the utility of the play list feature. Somewhat confusingly, the method of navigation depends on the device you are browsing. If you are browsing through a collection on a PC, you will get a nicely indexed list of the music or pictures on that PC, with nothing else getting in the way. With most portable devices however, you will be forced to navigate a standard folder structure to find your files. The exceptions are iPod and PlaysForSure devices, for which Microsoft has built in special support so you get the nicely indexed listings.

Xbox 360 supports all the common file types you’d expect—MP3, WMA (including protected WMA from a PC or from certain portable devices), WAV, GIF (non-animated), JPG, BMP and PNG. It even supports unprotected AAC through a free, optional download from the Xbox Live Marketplace – another accommodation for iPod users.

Making it yours

Indeed, Microsoft seems to be very accommodating with this console. It allows the player to customize several aspects of its appearance by adding themes, wallpaper and graphics to the Dashboard. Players will be able to choose from a selection of avatars for their online persona, and will be able to download more avatars, skins and themes from the Marketplace (some free, others at cost.) Unfortunately, Microsoft has opted not to allow people to create their own avatars, but everything else is fair game for editing to the player’s approval. Microsoft has even allowed for removable ‘faceplates’ across the front of the console. Faceplates are available from a number of companies who will custom-design them to your liking, and they are easy to remove and replace.

“The HD Era”

One of Microsoft’s talking points for the Xbox 360 is this idea of the “HD Era.” Put simply, Microsoft is forcing developers to support high-definition, widescreen displays and Dolby Digital surround sound systems in all their games. Every game on Xbox 360 supports 720p at a minimum. This is all fine and dandy if you own an HD-capable display, but it does present some challenges for those who own standard displays. An example is Project Gotham Racing 3’s menus, which were designed for HD. Playing the game on a standard display yields menu options and information which is often too small and blurry to read comfortably, in a screen with black bars above and below. I’ve observed this phenomenon in a number of games.

Xbox 360 is also wireless-capable. The system comes with a wireless controller, which communicates with the console in an innovative fashion. The Rings of Light on both the console and the controller are segmented into quadrants, each representing a player position. When you activate a controller by pressing the Guide button, the console will automatically assign you the first free player position, and this will be indicated by its respective quadrant being lit up on your controller and on the console. So if you are player 1, the top-left quadrant of the Ring of Light will be lit on both your controller and the console. The console is smart enough to know if it is standing upright or laying flat, and will make sure the correct quadrant is lit up regardless. Onscreen messages and alerts also feature a Ring of Light, with a quadrant lit up to indicate the intended recipient of the alert. Also worth noting is that wired controllers are also used this way when connected via USB; there are no dedicated controller ports anywhere on the console. It is an incredibly slick system.

The wireless capability also extends to networking, with an optional Wireless Network adapter. The adapter snaps snugly onto the back of the console and connects via USB, providing access to A, B and G networks. The console features built-in tools to configure the adapter, connecting to your network and testing the connection.

Microsoft has not forgotten about your existing Xbox games. Xbox 360 will play a limited selection of games from the original Xbox through the use of emulation. These games will be given a graphical upgrade in the form of 720p resolution, anti-aliasing and some tweaks to texture rendering, resulting in much sharper, clearer rendering for your Xbox games. Microsoft will be releasing updates to the emulation to support more games as time goes on.

Conclusion

The Xbox 360 is nothing if not a promising machine. It’s clear that Microsoft has thought carefully about where it wants to take the videogame experience. The solution it has come up with won’t win any awards for out-of-the-box thinking, but it does everything it purports to do extremely well, with a lot of detail and careful focus-testing behind each feature. The way Xbox Live works on the new machine is a study in how online multiplayer gaming should work.
Unfortunately, as of this writing, Xbox 360 is lacking in one crucial aspect: the games. The current crop of Xbox 360 games are amazing showcases of the Xbox 360’s graphical capability, but they are also uninspired, highly conservative efforts designed more to make the Xbox 360’s launch window than to provide any sort of unique experience. If Microsoft can get great games onto the pipeline in a reasonable timeframe, Xbox 360 will be a force to be reckoned with. Until then, it stands as a machine with a ton of unrealized potential.