Interfacing

By Plagiarize

So it’s finally here. It’s on my desk and it’s quietly humming away to itself as I type. The X-Box 360. The console that Microsoft built, finally free of the identity crisis the last one had.

Of what do I speak? Well, the X-Box just wanted to be a console with a hardrive. A powerful one for the time, but just a console none the less. Oh I’m not going to start spitting out hyperbole don’t worry. Let’s just say I found the console to be worth every penny, though not perfect.

I honestly think that the 360 is an important milestone in console design… for the interface.

Getting the 360 home for the first time, I must admit to a little paranoia. Checking the car hadn’t been tailed to the grocery store we stopped off on the way… the people at EB hadn’t helped with their comments to people in the store that what I left with ‘didn’t exist’.

Setting it up was incredibly easy, as was transferring my X-Box live account. The only step that took a little fiddling about was setting up the wireless networking bridge… that was all already configured, but I had to look up the MAC address of the console to tell my router to allow it to pass.

All that was left then was to pick a resolution for the VGA cable. Ah yes, the VGA cable! Sega had the smarts to offer one for the Dreamcast and it’s rather amazing that it’s taken this long for anyone else to follow suit.

But that partly goes back to that identity crisis the X-Box had. A box full of PC components, many bought off the shelf… ‘It’s just a PC!’ people cried. Microsoft did everything they could to stop it being seen that way, and that wasn’t all good things. The USB ports in the front of the console were rewired and reshaped. Letting it plug into a monitor? That was never going to happen.

Whether it’s because most of parts inside the 360 are custom built for it this time or not, the 360 isn’t afraid to offer functionality that might be called PC esque, and it’s a better console for it.

Here’s a console with what you could only call an operating system. Oh, they call it the ‘dashboard’ yes, but it’s basically an operating system. The all round high standard of the so called dashboard, is what makes the 360 a milestone. Anyone who spends some time with it, is hoping that the PS3 and Revolution copy a lot of these ideas.

Part of the strength of the dashboard is ease of use. Consoles should be easy to use. Anyone who read my last editorial knows how I feel on that matter. You should just be able to drop the game in and play it, and of course, you can. What’s great about the dashboard is that it makes everything you could do on the x-box easier to do at the same time as improving on it, as well as offering you new things you can do.

A lot of that ties into how connected the 360 is. It’s always on line if you give it an internet feed, and it’ll tell all your friends and anyone else who cares to know, exactly what you’re up to on it. Apart from one understandable exception, whatever you’re doing, it’ll tell you when a friend comes online.

On the X-Box games had to be Live aware to support that functionality, the X-Box 360 itself is live aware. This means constant alerts as well as a vastly improved voice chat feature. You can start what’s called a private voice chat on the 360, which follows you just about everywhere (just about). So I can hook up with a friend, compare our games, suggest one to play, play that for a bit, go check out the store, download something, all the while keeping the voice chat going.

That makes it much easier for me to play games online with people I like and know. I don’t have to ask them what games they have, I can see that at the touch of a button.

The time that you won’t be able to keep a private voice chat going, or keep the console itself live aware is when you’re playing an X-Box game, and while for a lot of games you end up with something that looks better than it did on the X-Box, you’re still lamenting all the features you lose when you play an old game.

I can’t just hit the guide button and start one of my playlists streaming off my pc?

In just a few short days I’m spoiled.

I was cynical about the Marketplace when they announced it as a brilliant feature. ‘A brilliant way to make me pay for stuff I’m used to getting for free no doubt’… but I was wrong. The only flaw with it, and it’s no small flaw is that you can’t leave a download and go and do something else without stopping it.

This is a little silly given that there are two things you can do while downloading, namely voice chatting and listening to music, but you have to either start them first, or stop the download and go back and resume it.

Ah well, at least you can resume… but with some of the demos being almost a gig, it’s something I hope they can improve on.

Demos? Hell yes. My favourite new feature. You can download demos! For free! Right now about half the games have demos on the marketplace, with more on the way… and it’s just one of those things that has you scratching your head as to why the X-Box didn’t do it.

You’ve probably noticed by now that all my raving is almost totally centred around features you need the hard drive for. I have to admit, while I thought there’d be a market for the core system, the only market I see for it is someone without the internet who doesn’t want to play X-Box games on the system.

About the only thing you’d be able to take advantage of with a core system would be achievements. No online play after a patch or two, no new maps, no demos, no trailes, no Live arcade… no point.

Achievements are great, but they’re not enough to carry the system.

They are another one of those features I look at as inspired brilliance. I’m not so sure about the points attached to them, but to essentially have persistent medals awarded to me by the game is the kind of thing that’s going to keep me up going ‘just one more go’, as I was with Hexic HD last night. Oh you can laugh at me for playing a game like that for four hours into the wee small hours, but you haven’t played it I’m sure.

Online scoreboards are all over the place. They’ve brought back the high score! And since you can filter out a list of just your friends, you can have a high score table that matters to you. They’ve managed to make even single player games feel part of a community, and that’s impressive.

You’ll notice I haven’t mentioned anything that didn’t come with the more expensive system (beyond the VGA cable), and that’s the point. I’m not trying to highlight the power of the console, but the pure functionality of it. This is all stuff that could have been done before… nay, should have been done before, and it’s standard setting.

I suppose I should mention the joypad. It’s lovely, wired or wireless. Battery life seems pretty good on the wireless pad, though the odd part is that the battery indicator is on screen. You have to press the guide button to check the battery, and it just feels strange. It’s a good function though, you don’t have to look down to check the battery life (and how many pads have a battery life indicator anyways). The only thing I do wish they had, was a physical switch on the pad.

To turn it off you have to hold down the guide button until the console asks you if you want to turn it off. You turn it off on the console? I guess that’s to enable things like powering on the console with the joypad.

The X-Box 360 isn’t worth buying without games, but if there’s three or more games you’re interested in, you should seriously consider it… while games that couldn’t be done on other systems are rather thin on the ground, playing a game that’s just the same with better graphics is enriched a lot more than you’d expect.

And… if the PS3 is just a PS2 with better graphics, I’m sure I’m not going to be the only one who is disappointed.

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