Greg Kasavin
Executive Editor

Show Me Something

The ourcolony marketing campaign took many forms.

I've never experienced a platform launch that was anything like the Xbox 360 unveiling. This has been a really wild ride, and while it's been very frustrating from my perspective as an editor, it's been really exciting from my perspective as a game player. I was fortunate to be able to attend the taping of the MTV special, which you can read all about in my account of that event, but what really struck me about all this is how Microsoft's really harnessed grass-roots support for its new console. Rather than go to the mainstream media or the gaming press to break news of the new console, Microsoft went straight to an outlet that can speak directly to its target audience.

As for all those leaked images and rumors over the months, frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if most of them were carefully contrived as part of the overall marketing effort. I mean, we're talking about the company that green-lighted ilovebees.com and ourcolony.net, here. Microsoft is all about the viral marketing and not playing by the rules with the Xbox 360.

The design of the new Xbox is inspired enough to be compared to the iPod.

As for the system itself, I think it looks great, and I'm really excited about the features that it has to offer. It's the same sort of gut reaction I had to the PSP and the iPod. I see it, and I go, "Ooh, I want one."

Then I take a step back, and I realize I know little or nothing about the games for this thing that's coming out in November. What I've seen of the games thus far has me almost completely unimpressed. So I know there's going to be a lot of work that needs to be done in the coming months, because, after all, I don't plan on buying an Xbox 360 just because it looks nice.

I'm happy with the current generation of games. It will take a lot more for Microsoft to convince me that the Xbox 360 represents the next generation of gaming, even though I admit the company's done a great job of building up a lot of excitement over its new machine.

Jeff Gerstmann
Senior Editor

Hardware Has Evolved. What About Game Design?

So I'll have more choices in jerseys and stuff when I play NBA Street. Is that enough to care?

It's easy to get excited about the Xbox 360 when you start running down the list of features in the hardware. A lot of it just seems like common sense, but the standardization of things like HD support and Live Awareness go a long way toward making the Xbox 360 sound like the future. Could all of this mean that we'll finally be able to do away with the silly check boxes on the back of every game box? If nothing else, I'd imagine we'd see that space reduced to key stuff, like how many players the game supports.

Some of the other more buzzwordy stuff, like "microtransactions" and "episodic content," sounds like it could finally pan out this time around. But these words are approaching "set-top box" on the consumer electronics cliché-o-meter, so I'm going to have to wait to see more of them before I get on board with either of the concepts. Done right, they could be very big, though.

But let's face it. While the gadgety nature of a game console that hooks up to your Media Center PC and receives messages from your friends all the time appeals to my gadget-dork side in much the same way that the PSP's video playback feature does, it all comes back to the games.

New box. But familiar characters.

What games can we expect to see on the Xbox 360? So far it seems likely that we'll see Madden and another Perfect Dark game. So, let me get this straight. For your all-new mind-busting game console, you have...a football game and a sci-fi-themed first-person shooter. You don't say. Will someone please make a World War II-themed first-person shooter, too? And 20 different racing games that randomly fall into either the "sim" or "arcade" categories? OK, not to needlessly sound pessimistic, but my real point is that this is a new console, and I'd like to see something totally world-shattering. Something that actually ushers in a new era in gaming. Will the Xbox 360 be up to the task? Or will we just be playing the same games with better graphics and 64 players online instead of just 16? That's the real question. All of the console's integrated and standardized features will certainly make the act of playing a game much, much smoother, and hopefully we'll see some game developers take some interesting chances this time around.

Andrew Park
Senior Editor

Don't Throw Out Your Gaming PC Just Yet

For the last few years, we've seen or heard of a few attempts to bring PC games into the living room. While they sound interesting, none of them are out the door, and none of them have proven themselves to be anything more than novelties.

These will also plug into your PC.

I'm all for media center functionality in the new console, assuming it all works as advertised, because there's already too much junk piled up around my TV (including my Xbox, my PS2, my GameCube, my Dreamcast, my Neo-Geo cartridge system, and an old DVD player I'm still holding onto for some reason). I don't think I see the Xbox 360 and the PC game markets seamlessly converging just yet, which is apparently what Microsoft seems to hope will happen with its XNA developer environment (a set of developer-only tools that will apparently bundle in support for USB controllers and Xbox Live-style online functionality). I met with Dean Lester of Microsoft, who heads up the Games for Windows group, at Game Developers Conference 2005, and Lester emphasized such particular strengths of the PC platform as online play, community support, and the default mouse/keyboard control setup. The fact is that PC and console game audiences are also different, and in some cases, they simply have different preferences that have been built up from generations of games. So, no, there's no need for console developers to desperately try to cram some kind of traditional mainstay PC genre, like real-time strategy, onto consoles.

You could play WoW on a console. But would you want to?

I also don't see the Xbox 360 as the preferred platform of choice for people to play World of Warcraft. And unless the 360 comes with an optional mouse and keyboard, I don't know that it would even be fair to pit the owners of the console version of a Halo 3 against the owners of a PC version, because two analog sticks and trigger buttons just won't cut it against mouse aiming. (That's not a derogatory remark against your amazing console Halo skills; that's just a statement of fact that mouse aiming is infinitely more precise than the current generation of console controllers allows. Don't believe me? Try it yourself.)

I do hope to see a great console from Microsoft that plays great games, though. I just have to clear some more space around my already-cluttered TV area for it.