and All Consoles

The successor to Microsoft’s Xbox, the X360 was the first to arrive of the seventh generation consoles. It has been designed to offer a considerable increase in performance over its predecessors, with an emphasis now on convergence – meaning the intention to move towards being a complete home entertainment system, not simply a games console.

Convergence can sometimes be a bad thing. An example being Nintendo’s Wii, which is only intended to do one thing and does that very well. That doesn’t by any way mean that the Xbox 360 is the gaming equivalent of a combination toaster / digital camera / MP3 player. As well as offered a quality gaming experience, a top of the range Xbox 360 incorporates a DVD player, a web browser, a webcam, a chat-room, a digital camera, and a MP3 player.

In respect of the specifications – The Xbox 360 is fitted with a Xenon CPU that clocks at 3.2 gigahertz and has a reported top performance of 115.2 gigaflops. The GPU is an ATI-chip named Xenos. The installation includes two separate silicon dies, each on it own chip capable of 500 MHz. The CPU and GPU both share 512 MEG of 700 megahertz GDDR3 RAM. The DVD drive is 12x and can read at sixteen MB a second, which leaves Sony’s PlayStation 3 4.5 in the dust. So it all seems pretty impressive. In practical terms, the Xbox 360 is great at blurring, lighting, and particle effects. In no way is it being outperformed in graphic quality or speed by the PlayStation 3.

The Xbox 360 is capable of supporting up to four wireless controllers at once, as well as the options to add headsets, which allow free roam within thirty feet of the console. It is able to support HDTV and six-channel Dolby Surround sound. Using the enhance picture and sound qualities will have a great benefit on the games.

When you purchase an Xbox 360 console you automatically gain silver-level membership to Xbox Live. If you choose to upgrade to gold-level this costs about $50 a year which will entitle you to access to online-only content, game downloads at the Arcade, worldwide tournaments, live chat and networking – a complete social experience. In view of the extreme popularity of MMORPG style online gaming over the last several years, it’s not really any surprise that Microsoft decided to put so much effort into their online content. As Xbox Live has been around for so much longer than its competitor’s equivalents, it makes it a much richer experience.

With Microsoft continually adding new downloads and releasing new accessories, it’s no surprise that they have promised to take Xbox Live one step further with Live Anywhere. As demonstrated at the last E3 show, this will enable Xbox gaming cross-platform, onto PC’s and mobile phones. Microsoft has promised that both Shadow Run and Halo 2: Vista will be Live Anywhere enabled. What that does actually mean in practical terms remains to be seen.

The Xbox 360 is still in many ways a typical Microsoft product – It’s generally solid, but still unexciting. It is able to deliver a competent and rewarding experience, but there wasn’t any of the innovative risk-taking that was seen with Nintendo’s Wii. It’s had it own share of widely publicised technical problems, and Microsoft’s service and public relations for the Xbox tends to be on par with that for their PC products. Many people may have been surprised that Microsoft had not put more effort into enabling a backward compatible system with more of the original Xbox games. However, there is a rumour that Microsoft sent out the compulsory Fall Update to intentionally brick modded consoles. If that is really true or not, it still seems to have a horrible believability about it.

Still, none of these things have had any effect on people using Windows. The Xbox 360 console, is still pretty reliable, as long as it does not blue-screen, or over-heat with protracted use, which it has a slight tendency to do. The peripherals available are all extremely well built. There’s already a huge catalogue or good-quality games, and a year after release, the Xbox 360 still looks impressive and runs well.

Published By Darren Lintern