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By
the standards previously set by the gaming industry, the Xbox has
had a short life. With the average life-span of a successful
console being five years, the Xbox is still looking  relatively
youthful being only three years-of-age, but it’s clear it been a
healthy lifespan; one with which inspired many people to enjoy the
delight of playing with Microsoft’s new toy. Quite a following has
been established, a following that will soon be moving onto
Microsoft’s next-toy which has now been announced for over 8
months, having been first discussed at the GDC meeting earlier in
the year under the heading “The Future of Games: Unlocking the Opportunity”. In this
announcement J. Allard stated that High Definition T.V. (HDT.V.) was
the way forward, that the Xbox Marketplace was the future, and that
Microsoft and their Next-Gen console were the ones to take us there.
In a press release released the same day, summarizing the
conference, bullet pointed notes gave much more of an indication to
what Microsoft intended:
Building
on 10 years of innovation with the DirectX API, the Microsoft
Windows and Xbox platforms will enable groundbreaking game
experiences in the HD Era. Illustrating what that means for gamers,
Allard shared the first details about the next-generation Xbox
guide. Persistent across all games and media experiences, the guide
is an entertainment gateway that instantly connects players to their
games, their friends and their digital media.
Features of the guide include these:
- Gamer
Cards.
Gamer Cards provide gamers with a quick look at key XboxLIVE! information.
They let players instantly connect with people who have similar
skills, interests and lifestyles.
- Marketplace.
Browseable by game, by genre, and in a number of other ways, the
Marketplace will provide a one-stop shop for consumers to acquire
episodic content, new game levels, maps, weapons, vehicles, skins
and new community-created content.
- Micro-transactions.
Breaking down barriers of small-ticket online commerce,
micro-transactions will allow developers and the gaming community
to charge as little as they like for content they create and
publish on Marketplace. Imagine players slapping down $.99 to buy
a one-of-a-kind, fully tricked-out racing car to be the envy of
their buddies.
- Custom
playlists.
This feature eliminates the need for developers to support custom
music in games. The guide instantly connects players to their
music so they can listen to their own tracks while playing all
their favourite next-generation Xbox games.
Typifying the HD Era game experience, the guide requires hardware
designed with software in mind. System-level features of the guide
such as custom playlists, the XboxLIVE! Friends list and
Voice Chat are enabled at the chip level, liberating developers to
focus on creating games, not developing for technical
certification requirements (TCRs).
This of course got a lot of people interested in what Microsoft were
doing, as this actually wasn’t like any other Hardware developer.
The next thing Microsoft gave the general public was a list in the
form of every developer that had pledged support for the Xbox360, at
the time, still known as either NeXtBox or Xenon. It was huge, a
list of 28 mainly comprising of the publishing heavyweights like
Electronic Arts, Konami, Activision, Capcom, Atari,
Codemasters, KOEI, Namco, Rockstar Games, SEGA and UBi soft. Showing
that not only was Microsoft seeking to change things, but also, that
they had the support to do so. At the same time they promised a
pipeline of titles for original Xbox in 2007 to add to the 200 or
more that they added this year, showing just a small amount of
support for the old Xbox!
Just
3 days later Microsoft spoke of the grand Next-Gen Xbox unveiling in
May, it was to be held in association with MTV and with special
guest Elijah Wood; a self-confessed Xbox fan. In this grand
unveiling Microsoft showed the world the Xbox360. You’d think that
would be all wouldn’t you, grand Xbox360 unveiling, hundreds of
celebrities present, just leave it like that and release the box,
job done. Not in Microsoft’s eyes not at all.
Next
on the list were the peripherals,
this came at the same time as the grand unveiling, and these
included Faceplates, to keep with Microsoft’s personalisation
conquest, a Memory Unit, Xbox360 Universal Remote and Wireless
Controllers and for the XboxLIVE! Mode, there’s a Camera
and the standard Headset, not a huge amount but plenty enough to get
the rumour mills going over what else there could be! At the same
time came another announcement, the Xbox360’s power. Demonstrated
in full glory - and playable to some - at E3 2005 in LA, May 2005, a
keynote speech on the eve of the show was followed by a brief
listing. This “listing” took the form of press release of jargon
to your average human, but to anyone who knew stuff about the
interns of a computer this was gold dust. It simply said, super
quick, super powerful and super fast, everything you could want to
hear! If you’re still not sure it’s jargon to the average man
here’s a quote:
Custom
ATI Graphics Processor
- 500MHz
processor
- 10 MB of
embedded DRAM
- 48-way
parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
- Unified
shader architecture
Polygon
Performance
- 500 million
triangles per second
Pixel
Fill Rate
·
16 gigasamples per second fill rate
using 4x MSAA
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These
were announced along with 40 other publishers willing to donate
games to the game download feature. Plus, of course, there’s the
added option of streaming music and video’s straight to your
Xbox360.
With such a huge change to the face of the gaming world
imminent, it’s not surprising that Microsoft are pulling out all
the stops to make this the release of the century, there’s many
shows going round the country, the main one is the Hour Tour, Sixty
360’s and a load of games going all over the country from Glasgow,
this weekend. So how will this console fare in the unfair, survival
of the fittest world we have built for it? Many, many have fallen
before - could this just be another in the line? Only a month and it
will all become clear - very, very clear!
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