Xbox 360 - Up Close & Personal with Live, the Console and the Wireless Controller
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 20, 2005 12:57 AM EST- Posted in
- Trade Shows
The Live Marketplace: More Ways to Spend Money
The Xbox 360 will also allow you to bring up the dashboard without having to restart your console. The new dashboard looks a lot cleaner and the entire interface is very smooth and quite media-center like, with a gaming touch, of course.Microsoft is particularly happy about their new Xbox Live Marketplace, a place where you will be able to download or purchase new content (demos, themes, levels, etc.):
The Xbox Live Marketplace in the Xbox 360 Dashboard
See that banner looking thing at the top of the screen? Clicking on it brought us to the following screen:
Here, you can see how much the game download costs and how much credit your account currently has. The download for this particular game took less than 10 seconds after the purchase was confirmed.Honestly, we aren't nearly excited as Microsoft is about the new Live Marketplace, simply because the name implies that we'll be paying for quite a bit that finds its way in there. After spending $300+ on the console, $50 a pop for games and a monthly Xbox Live subscription fee, we're not sure how much more we'll feel comfortable parting with - especially for things like additional content and levels.
Bungie's strategy of charging for early access to levels in Halo 2 for example is reasonable in our opinion, as the levels eventually are offered for free to everyone else in time. Initially, we don't expect to see anything drastic from Microsoft in the Marketplace, but the potential always worries us.
As we mentioned in our first Xbox 360 article, Microsoft is particularly interested in expanding the potential user base of the new console to include "casual gamers." It is these "casual gamers" that the Xbox Live Arcade is targeted at.
Microsoft mentioned that you would be able to conduct a live video chat with your friends while playing the Arcade games.
Messaging in Xbox Live - No Email, No Spam
Connecting your Xbox 360 to a MP3 Player, iPods supported
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milomnderbnder21 - Sunday, May 22, 2005 - link
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/617/617951p1.htmlThere's a link, as proof I guess...
milomnderbnder21 - Sunday, May 22, 2005 - link
That critique/comparison is actually straight from Microsoft, some department or something. It was posted recently on IGN360, they said it was emailed to them or something from Microsoft.Obviously, that makes it biased, but there's no denying that it brings up a couple of interesting points. I would expect the PS3 to be more powerful though. The article underestimates the Cell.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Sunday, May 22, 2005 - link
golemiteIt was real, not running at full speed, but the only working 360 shown to the public at E3.
Take care,
Anand
golemite - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
so was the 360 at the ATI booth an actual prototype or not? from what i was told, it was one of the first working test units.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
flatblastardI don't get the impression that Nintendo will be able to compete, specification-wise, with Microsoft and Sony. That doesn't mean that their console won't be competitive because, after all, it is the games that matter. But without strongly competitive specs, it wouldn't make sense for Nintendo to reveal anything at E3 from a PR standpoint.
barnett25
I'm not one to critique other peoples' work, but there are a number of factual errors presented in that link.
Remember that the Xbox 360's 256GB/s of bandwidth is a figure for on-die bandwidth between the 192 FPUs and the embedded DRAM on the daughter die. Including that figure in a system bandwidth comparison is like me telling you how much bandwidth exists between the Pentium 4's Trace Cache and its Decoder and then comparing that to the Athlon 64's main memory bandwidth. It's not a valid comparison.
Comparing the number of general purpose cores between the two CPUs (cell and xbox 360) and using that as a benchmark is also a highly invalid comparison. If I published an article where I said that the dual core Pentium D 840 offered twice the general purpose performance as a single core Athlon 64 4000+...well, you guys wouldn't buy that would you :) So why would that sort of a comparison work for the PS3 vs. Xbox 360?
I wouldn't put much faith in those types of claims, if you go back and read any of our articles about CPU architecture (including the Cell article) you will realize that a number of these types of claims are quite easily debunked.
As I mentioned before, I'm not one to criticize other peoples' work, but if you have any specific questions about whether or not a particular claim is true (or makes sense) ask it and I'll do my best to answer it.
Take care,
Anand
Staples - Saturday, May 21, 2005 - link
Very neat. Seems like the PS3 is almost a faster PS2 and that is about all. MS certainly has the upperhand as far as interface goes.barnett25 - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
Anand: I'd like to see what you have to say about the PS3, Xbox comparison at http://www.majornelson.com.flatblastard - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
Anand #19I do appreciate your effort in at least making an attempt to get into the press conference. How did it go...."Fink? We've never heard of you." I guess the old saying that, It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know, is still true. The big N has a history of doing this, so I'm not really surprised. I guess I was just expecting more from our great reviewer but if there was nothing to report, then there's nothing to report. duh
tfranzese - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
#24, sorry if you don't like me actually looking forward to the big N's next console. I actually enjoy my Gamecube along side my Xbox, so I will probably be buying two consoles again.As long as Nintendo makes their 1st party titles, that's enough reason for me to buy their system. I don't buy it so I can play EA's 20th rendition of Madden, Live, NFS, or any other 3rd party title. I'll have an Xbox for that junk. I've been more than satisfied with the quality and quantity of titles Nintendo has put on the Gamecube, and I have more to look forward to.
shaw - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
#20 Look at how much nostalgia helps Sega. :pPeople used to think the world was flat once, get over it, move on.