I have very conflicting feelings about the Xbox 360.
At a deep emotional level, I don’t want Microsoft to succeed as they are a big annoying faceless company – I instinctively much prefer that things work out for Sony, the other big annoying faceless company or Nintendo. Also, Sony and Nintendo are Japanese – what other reasons do you need?
Design
This time around, Microsoft hired actual designers to create the console.
But the screenshots from new Xbox live are quite ugly. Microsoft has all the resources in the world, yet they always make odd-looking UI designs. Did anybody ever say, “I really like the default theme in Windows XP”?
Online
Judging from what was published and the “leaked” developer video, the online and IM component is going to be big, and rightly so. Nothing can ever beat playing with your friends or chatting with your friends. But are we all going to have USB keyboards plugged in?
Backwards compatibility
And backwards compatibility is still unclear. As has been suggested, this is probably because MS has a somewhat working emulator, but is unsure how good they can make it, how perfect it has to be, or what effect it will have on sales. Even with 99% or so compatibility, weird bugs may still pop up on emulated games due to timing differences. I think they need it, because it is still quite early in the life cycle of the Xbox.
Update May 17th: The 360 will be “backward-compatible with top-selling Xbox games“. It doesn’t work all too well apparently, but it is being tweaked to work with selected titles.
Media Center
Game Girl Advance is raving about using the 360 as a media center. Here, I am not so sure. It’s part of the convergence story that we have been force-fed for the last decade, and both the PS2 and the Xbox 1 had DVD-playing capabilities, but it ended up being not such big a deal.
The 360 could be a great media center if MS really went as far the modding community, but I suspect that several things will hold them back: Will MS sell you a console with network playing of all the 15 variations of the Divx codec, QuickTime, mp3, ogg? Or will they only accept Windows Media files and only with DRM? Will you be able to upload your own python scripts? Probably not.
Sony has been trying this already with the PSX (PS2 with more multimedia capabilities).
The HD Era
The way Allard was selling the console at GDC, with us now entering “The High Definition TV Era” is horrible. I can only assume they had lots of scriptwriters working on the best catchline, and that this was the worst they could come up with. “The Xbox 360. It has more pixels”.
We are all semi-doomed
The HD Era adds to the feeling of impending doom: Game budgets will skyrocket once again, and judging from the complete lack of imagination in the announced 360 titles, nothing will ever happen again, it’s all master chief and exploding cars the rest of our days.
And yet – MS hints at downloadable “pilots” and episodic content. This really could be a break that allowed for smaller budget projects to get to the end consumer. Depending on how controlled the channel is going to be.
Is this the alternative distribution system that we are crying for?
Perhaps the more general problem is that the developers of the “medium” (hardware) lose money on the machines and make it on the software, and for that reason prevent non-licensed developers from making content for it. Like if the makers of your DVD machine controlled what DVDs could be made. Not good.
I also really wish that the console makers would realize that the gaming community is absolutely international and that region coding is absolutely evil. Katamari Damacy is not out in Europe, and I am shuffling boot discs and inserting weird plastic things into my PS2 in order to play my US and Japanese imports.
My big dream scenario is that someone makes an Xbox 360 / PS3 / Nintendo Revolution game called “The Indie Game Channel”. This is a physical DVD product that comes with a few games, but also lets you to download and play quirky, independent games at 15$ a piece. Now, that would make me happy.
[Update May 20th: Anandtech has acquired many more details about the Xbox 360 as a media center, downloadable games and so on.]
Live Arcade is one real leg up that MS has over the competition. The Dashboard interface is doing a lot of good work.
However, I have heard rumours that Live Arcade’s internal development budget was cut! So, the one *useful* thing that can separate them from the competition is something they won’t invest any belief in. What a pity.
Jesper, what will be the future of videogames industry? I’m not very happy with Microsoft introducing its way of seeing technology, with all that marketing-consuming thing, ultra-horsepower consoles without innovation… I don’t know, but maybe now it’s happening something similar than what happened in the mid 80’s with Atari’s poor vision of the business. PS3 is a really ugly console, they want us to eat the same sh… as always, the same games, the same sequels, I don’t even think in cinema as a so predictible industry, even Star Wars let something more to the imagination that the the same gunned, violent, racist and sexist games of always. We are idiotizing our teenagers in giving them to eat that garbage.
I see Nintendo as a little innovator, Nintendogs is an example, Project Rub is also a good one. Can you, with your knowledge, illustrate us a little bit more?
I just setup a Pluto Home system (smarthome + media server, plutohome.com, free open source). It?s really cool. It has a streaming movie server, music server, pvr. Plus it does home automation and controls a/v equipment too. There?s only 1 problem?
You designate 1 PC to be the server; they call it the core. It exposes a network boot image for any other PC in the house, so your PC becomes dual purpose?normal pc, or net boot and it?s a set top box. You control it with Bluetooth mobile phones or web pads. And all the set top boxes in the house work together. Your media even follows you as you move from room to room if you keep the phone on. The problem is I don?t have enough media pc?s for all the rooms in my house, and buying a full PC for each room is too expensive. Plus there?s no video cards for the PC that have component video output?which is the only way I can get HDTV into my tv.
The X-Box seems perfect as a media director. It?s a PC inside, right? So why couldn?t it boot like normal as an Xbox, or net boot as a pluto media director? Then it would be part of a whole house solution that did everything. I could even use the Xbox to turn on my sprinklers if I wanted, and do all sorts of stuff with it. Plus, since Pluto gives it a network boot image, space is no longer an issue?all the software could be stored on the main server. And the XBox has component video and it?s quiet and cheap.
Does anybody have an idea if it would be possible to use the XBox as a media director like that, doing a network boot? Then I could just buy a few of the XBox?s rather than having to buy regular PC?s.