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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Shinei - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
I think it's pretty well confirmed by now that KillZone 2 is not pre-rendered; it's a demo recorded from actual gameplay and played back at the E3 Sony conference. It's been shown that IGN isn't the most reliable source of "inside" information, so please don't counter with an IGN links.And from what I've heard from KillZone 1 players, the KZ2 demo looks to have fixed most of the problems from KZ1. Of course, these same people also play KillZone for the shooting, and not the sweeping storyline, so mileage may, of course, vary.
knitecrow - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
killzone 2??did you play the original?
Ok, I can understand DMC4, tekken and even MGS4 BUT killzone?
Would people be attracted to a system if they showed pre-rendered footage from Driv3r, cat woman or some other bad game?
Shinei - Friday, May 20, 2005 - link
Oh man, I hope they offer wired controllers--I'm not in the mood to pay for the unit, the games, the controllers, XBox Live, AND batteries for the damn controllers. F that right in its overused A.Other than that, good condensation of all known data for XBox 2. I'm still on the fence about buying one, but that's only because the game lineup is so weak right now (and KillZone 2 is SO promising)...
ps, first post with constructive content, OWNED nubcakes.