Xbox 360 – World’s First Unrestricted Hardware Access – Hot Poop!

Yesterday, in a swanky venue in Covent Garden, London, Microsoft fed us very delicious hors d'oeuvres, before Englishman Chris Satchell of Microsoft Advance Technology Group opened up the machine Microsoft wants you to buy this Christmas.

You might have read other such pieces in the last day or two: there was no point, as our journalist colleagues from other publications were too busy ogling mini sausages to report all the facts. Unlike us.

Firstly, let’s talk about elements of the actual box.

The Ring of Light:
We’ve heard plenty of marketing guff about the ring of light. Truth be told, it’s just a very simple, though smart concept. Basically, the ring of light surrounds the power button. It’s split into four sections, each representing one of the four Wi-Fi controllers you can plug into the machine. When they’re on, the ring lights up the quarter corresponding to what pad is turned on. Simple, stylish and quite nice to look at.

The Controllers:
They are very much cordless and rechargeable. You can use two AA batteries or a rechargeable pair of batteries that can be charged by plugging a cable in the top of the pad and straight into one of the USB ports at the front or back of the console. You can also play while recharging. The battery life of the controllers is said to hit the 30 hour mark, with a higher number mooted for controllers using two AA batteries.

You can also turn the machine on and off from the joypad! Excellent news for sofa-dwelling bastards like ourselves.

There are no plans for an adaptor that allows more than four players, but the idea has not been written off either: “It’s all relative to what publishers need to realise their game visions”, said the man from Microsoft.

USB Ports:
There are two on the front and two on the back, the ones on the back placed for hiding uglier connections like wireless adapters and such. You can plug in anything that has a USB 2.0 male connector on it. Digital cameras, iPods, PSPs, whatever.

And now what’s inside the box:

Xbox live:
Same as before, but now with a newly re-vamped gameplay performance recording system and lobbies. You can also bring up the Live menu during any experience – watching videos through Media Centre, listening to music and even when playing games.

Also, your reputation is displayed. After playing with someone, you can give them a thumbs up or down. This accumulates and gives you a total that tells others how much of an angel or arsehole you are in the Live arena.

If you want to play games with people more like yourself, you now have a number of lobbies you can visit. You can play in the kids room for a swear word-free experience, or go all out f’ing and blinding in the underground lobby. There’s a lobby for almost every taste.

You also have a Gamerscore which indicates how good a gamer you are supposed to be. The beauty of this is that it updates offline as well as online, meaning when you enter online games, you’ll will not find yourself typically placed with a bunch of cack-handed losers.

Sadly, none of your Xbox gameplay will count toward this score. On the flipside, you can port over your Xbox Live account across from your Xbox to your Xbox 360. A very helpful menu on the machine takes you through it step by step.

User Favourites:
Do you hate having to set invert the Y-axis controls every time you load up a new game on Xbox? Now you don’t have to. The User Favourites menu on the machine’s control panel now let’s you set up common control favourites that will default across all games. Very nice.

Jeff Minter’s Visualiser Sex-Heaven:

That’s not its actual name, but it might as well be. Very trippy stuff and we very much look forward to taking hallucinogenic drugs while staring at it at some point. Not that you really need to. It’s pretty nuts. You can also alter the visualisation with the controller, and later on, with the Xbox 360 camera and a dance peripheral Microsoft will soon announce.

See the first video footage of Mr Minter's, erm, thingy here:
MPEG4 video (Xvid) (640x480 - 937Kb)
Quicktime (640x480 - 1.2Mb)
Windows Media (320x240 - 896Kb)

Stream music from an MP3 player and take pics from your PSP, though no video streaming yet
Yes. Even an iPod. Chris plugged in his iPod, popped up one of his playlists and played one of his own tunes in record time. Plug and play convenience too.

He then plugged in the PSP and showed us his digital library, including images from FIFA 360 and Project Gotham 3. And his dog.

The plug and play USB also supports hundreds of digital cameras, but is yet to support video playback from a USB device. Reasons cited were that getting the support from all these devices for video playback was not an easy task and it’s being looked at, but nothing’s final.

Media Center:
A digital video recorder similar to TiVo or Sky+, where you can digitally record TV footage and stream it in 720p through your 360. We were shown a recorded TV broadcast of Star Wars: Episode 2, and sadly, there were artifacts (weird, small coloured patches) in the image, but it was mostly promising. He even popped up his Xbox Live menu while the bar scene went on.

Other burning issues!
Backwards compatability – Yes, you do need the Hard Drive…but what did you expect? Xbox games used a hard drive, so of course they’ll need one to run. As to the issue of compatibility, Satchell was reluctant to go into detail, though he did hint that any extras needed would be fed through conveniently placed channels like the Live service (patching?) or other such facilities. There was sadly no comment offered regarding the mystery content that will be packed in on the hard drive

Max players online at once? 16 players online have been seen as have 32. Satchell stated it’s all relative and works fine thus far.

Memory Card freebies - if you have a memory card, steps are being taken so you can take it to a kiosk, either placed in a games shop or elsewhere, where you can grab extra free or paid-for content. Nice touch.

All games will feature HD and 720p: as for frame rate concerns, it will vary from developer to developer. There is no fabled frame rate restriction as per stupid rumours floating around based on low frame rate E3 demos.

Keyboard and Mouse – only for inputting text: a controversial decision has been made to disallow use of keyboard and mouse with games. However, Satchell stated that if demand is high enough, this will change.

DVD – Is it region locked? This is currently unknown, though will be answered soon.

The Xbox 360 Camera peripheral: it supports a 640x480 image at 30 frames per second. It’s also very small and has a built-in microphone. Applications for the device were not divulged, but many speculate EyeToy-style software. Satchell did however confirm that it’s compatible with Minter’s music visualiser, so people can dance like nonces in front of it and affect the images.

There are currently no plans for an Augmented Reality style add-on for the Xbox 360, but Chris likes the technology, so it may happen.

Xbox Live VISA cards that are available in Germany: there are no plans to bring them anywhere else, but don’t rule it out.

That’s it for now. More as it breaks!