Xbox 360 - It's Here & It's On

Our detailed impressions and obligatory photo overload is here, as Kikizo's Xbox 360s arrive. Has it really been worth all the hype? Let's see, in our definitive feature.

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In terms of the next media capability, photo viewing; it's basically all the exact same principle as with music streaming. Except there doesn't seem to be any way to actually "copy" photos onto the 360's Hard disc as you can with music by ripping a CD. We'll have to look into this and see if we're wrong, though. So nothing amazingly impressive here. Especially when the wireless thing still isn't working! (Anger).

The biggest gripe relates to video capabilities. You can only watch videos already stored on your 360's hard drive, either the examples that come preloaded (some soccer sort of video thing for example) or ones you have downloaded via Marketplace or whatever. What we want, at the very damn least, is to be able to stream videos from the PC via any connection that we can with the music or photos, or even better, copy them too (which you can't with music of photos either). You can't do any of that, so you can forget about watching all those TV shows, porn or whatever from your PC via the Xbox 360.

Having said that though, it looks like it's certainly possible to achieve this sort video playback and better media distribution to your 360, IF your PC is running the Widows Media Center operating system. Which none of ours do. You can upgrade from XP to WMC, but who can be bothered? Additionally, it seems that many of the codecs outside of the WMV family (like the ones used to play the videos we offer here at Kikizo) are not supported on the 360, yet, so many files will apparently not play back properly anyway.

Widows Vista, the all-new PC operating system coming out next year, will apparently be able to do all this automatically, which will come as a bit of a relief when everyone starts upgrading or buying new Vista-equipped PCs, but that's not here RIGHT NOW, which makes us feel very sad and lonely. On the plus side, DVD playback (especially when controlled with either of 360's Media remote controllers) is a breeze on Xbox 360 - available straight out of the box and with progressive scan support, although to be honest, you'd really expect nothing less at this stage of the DVD format's lifecycle.

For now you can only stream videos and everything, by either buying the Windows Media Center OS for your PC, or using other dodgy, more complicated (and apparently unreliable) PC-side methods.

We feel, just a little, that connecting to Xbox Live or your Media Connection on a nearby PC is supposed to be really easy and something that most four year-olds can do, but because we're a little slow in the head, it took us about an hour to get it all working properly. This is exactly the sort of thing that needs to be easier with today's consumer electronics. We're sure it would all be much easier if we did it all from scratch for a second time, but we still can't get any wireless stuff working. Whether or not it's because it's genuinely a pain or we're just big, stupid babies, we'll leave for you to decide when you're busy configuring up your own systems and devices. We'll also get some second opinions on the matter from other Kikizo staff who are more clever than what I am.

Another thing that's been interesting in both good and bad ways is backwards compatibility [see compatible games list here].

Right now, we're running the Xbox 360 into a LCD TV/monitor through Xbox 360's VGA cable, and it looks great (using the VGA cable lets us choose settings from 640x480 up to 1360x768, most of which worked pretty well). However, when we tested out a copy of Halo 1, it told us, "This game does not support your current display settings. To change your display settings, go to the Xbox Dashboard and select System, Console Settings". We tried all the other available resolutions and none of them worked for Halo 1 - we just got the same message!

What the hell? Does this mean you can't play certain Xbox 1 games if you're using Xbox 360 through the VGA cable? It worked fine when we tried through composite and SCART connections though. And other Xbox 1 titles worked fine. You can still access the Dashboard directly when playing Xbox 1 games, though not the Guide itself, as you can during 360 games. But backwards compatible titles are not improved in any significant way when you're playing in SD modes.

Some Xbox 1 elements are not emulated particularly well either; we've noticed glitches on 2D presentation-style elements of Xbox 1 game title screens, such as Sonic Heroes, and FMV playback, sizes and audio can sometimes be pretty choppy. Playing around with 360's display options doesn't seem to improve things much in this respect. We have also encountered a couple of complete system crashes during Xbox emulation, on the otherwise glorious-looking Dead or Alive A for example, proving that the software emulation is not perfect, but hopefully can be further improved in later updates.

Fortunately, the vast majority of in-game, 3D graphics emulation appears to be very stable and faithful, and there are very few major glitches we've noticed - but when you notice them, you really notice them - try throwing a shuriken at the wall in one of Ninja Gaiden's first rooms. Nonetheless, when it DOES work through VGA or regular HD, games of course looks brilliant. It would be cool if they could somehow further use the new power to bump up frame rates of Xbox 1 games and things like that, but so far, that's not the case.

We've now obviously been able to test the process of downloading patches to make compatible Xbox 1 titles work, and it's really quick and straightforward - thankfully, ten seconds or less gets the job done, as long as you're signed into Live. Redeemed! Vitally, Xbox 360 does feel like a genuinely backwards compatible system; the number of Xbox 1 games we can play on this machine right now is pretty expansive - and we're assured by Microsoft that the patches will keep coming.

It's lovely to play Ninja Gaiden in HD, and tempting to play through out 2004 Game of the Year from scratch were it not for the ridiculous workload around here. Can you work on patching OutRun2 next, please?

Anyway. We decided to do some side-by-side shots of the retail Xbox 360 and the debug version, because some have inaccurately been claiming that the black version looks "better". Actually the manufacture of the casing is not as high quality as the lovely sleek white retail version; there's no chrome finishing on the DVD drive bay, and so on. Of course for us it's better to have a debug, because although they won't play retail games, they're the only machines that will legally play pre-release game code. They also offer developers and reviewers much better system options such as hard drive storage and video/region options as mentioned earlier.

Last time we checked (today), Xbox 1 debugs have been, although deeply frowned upon, popping up and sold on eBay for up to $900 - so you can forget any Xbox 360 debugs for "personal use" unless a) some reviewer desperately wants to lose their job by breaking a strict debug agreement with Microsoft, and b) you have a lot of money. Debugs are always in high demand. And they'll probably release a black retail version for the hell of it after a year or so anyway. And maybe a "sky-blue" version too which will look better with our Sega faceplate, which we'll make ourselves if we have to.

So Xbox 360 is finally here, in our offices and living rooms, with just a few more days until it's finally freed from its meticulous and inventively publicised development process to the world at large. It is a very powerful machine with some fantastic launch games which we'll be reviewing in the coming days and weeks, and things are only set to get better as developers become more familiar with making games that take advantage of the machine's architecture, using final development hardware. You can find out more about our views on initial hardware power from the gaming perspective, and the launch line-up, in our recent extensive report.

On the media side of things, what we wanted was a machine that you place lovingly in your living room that does "everything", including diverse video playing capabilities, but it doesn't - not really - not easily - not yet at least.

The digital lifestyle is not something that is easy for any company to converge into a single experience on a single platform without hiccups concerning software and platform strategy, long-term compatibility and device issues, and legal and DRM considerations. But it's something that, with the arrival of Xbox 360, we expected to be initially slightly easier and more fulfilling as what's purported to be a very capable all-in-one box.

There's not much doubt that with the arrival of things like Windows Vista, the Xbox 360 media experience will be better for many, many users. But we don't know why things can't just be "easier" today in a lot of respects. If Microsoft wants to reach a billion customers with Xbox 360, there's still a little more that can be done to improve the platform, based on our first impressions. But this is certainly a very significant step in the right direction, not just for Xbox, but for the entire set of media industries it now pushes its way into - and moreover, it's a scalable one, that has the potential to get much better very quickly, at little (if perhaps incremental) cost to the consumer.

There's of course still every reason to be excited about buying an Xbox 360 - for starters it doesn't feel like this unit will just break down after two weeks, if you know what we mean - and it's generally a seriously hot console which we daresay has a bright future ahead of it. We look forward to sharing our in-depth thoughts with you on the superb launch games in our reviews next week. Meanwhile, we're off to look for the Windows Vista launch date, or the price of a Windows Media Center upgrade. And in certain respects, we can't help but thinking that maybe Microsoft wants you to do the same thing as well.

Adam Doree
Director, Kikizo.com

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