Mt. Tiburon Testing Labs
Living with the Xbox 360
By Kathleen Maher
The Xbox 360 is clearly this year's Tickle-Me Elmo. Stores started
reporting shortages shortly after Thanksgiving. If you want an Xbox
360 and you just can't find one you might try going to Japan because
we hear the machines are sitting on the shelves. According to a survey
conducted by Japanese publishers Enterbrain, Microsoft has sold less
than half of the 159,000 boxes the company has shipped to Japan for
the first week of sales. Enterbrain publishes the Japanese game magazine
Famitsu. Editor Munetatsu Matsui of Famitsu says the reason for the slow sales of the Xbox 360
is because gamers can't get their hands on "Dead" or "Alive 4." Here
in the U.S. the hot game is "Call of Duty II." Activi-sion says that
8 out of 10 buyers buy a copy of "Call of Duty II" along with their
new Xbox 360.
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Relive the thrill of meeting King Kong for the
first time. (Courtesy of Teambox.com)
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The urge to personalize
No doubt everyone reading this article is already very
familiar with the box design, which Microsoft introduced at E3 last
summer. It's an uninspired Jetson-style design that accommodates the
addition of different face plates. So, while the basic white box is
not all that inspiring, the ability to add face plates to personalize
the system is a nice touch.
Personalization, in fact, is what the Xbox is all about.
The set-up process is tightly interwoven with Xbox Live and lets users
add details about themselves and choose the type of game play they prefer
such as family or casual, interactive play or Underground for the vicious,
trash talking, fiercely competitive play that has so far defined much
of the world's online game play and has turned off the more sensitive
types and parents. With this generation, however, console developers
are hoping to engineer a change, making the online universe friendlier
for novices, younger kids, women, and moms. The nice thing that we found
is that the broader modes of game play and interaction do not seem so
dorky that regular players are doomed to shame and embarrassment because
they don't want to venture online into a game and be killed in seconds.
Microsoft has been proud of the Xbox Live arcade and
the casual games available. They should be. We're happily addicted to
"Helix" and to "Bejeweled," and we're ready to add a few more games
to our post-work, pre-dinner gaming hour.
Also, as part of the personalization of the Xbox 360,
Microsoft has added an improved ability to handle media—though, we might
add, the machine has a long way to go before it is a true media hub.
While we were able to rip music from CDs easily enough, there was no
GraceNote or similar capability to recognize track names and we can't
tell you how uninterested we are in adding each and every track title
by hand using the on-screen display.
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Quake 4—as scary as ever and pretty in
a weird sort of way. (Courtesy of Teambox.com)
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You call that music?
Also, according to Microsoft's list of features, it
should be possible to play an MP3 player through the Xbox 360. Why would
you want to do this? Because many games have mind-numbingly stupid music
and it might be nice to hear something else in the background. We tried
playing several different music players—a Creative Zen Micro, a Muvo,
a Rio Forge, and Napster's new player—and we struck out on all of them.
The instructions tell us to set the player to play through USB—we're
betting that you can do this on an iPod but we found no such setting
on the alternative players that we tend to favor. If you see a certain
irony in the fact that Microsoft seems to have devoted more effort to
making sure iPods play through the Xbox 360 than they have for other
Windows-friendly players you can sit next to us. As we have remarked
before, Microsoft doesn't get it right the first time and they don't
get it right the second time but, eventually, they do get it right.
As far as a media hub, count this as a second try. The first Xbox was
supposed to enable users to play their own music with games but it was
really just an inefficient CD player.
All that is, of course, of secondary importance. The
Xbox 360 is still first and foremost a game console. No one is buying
the machine as a media center. They'd buy a media center as a media
center.
Oh yeah . . . the games
There are several games we are anxiously awaiting.
Like the Japanese we wish we had a copy of "Dead" or "Alive 4" to play.
This frankly perverted game has the kind of fast, simple game play and
lush graphics that appeal to our atavistic need to shut down the higher
orders of reasoning and just punch someone out. But, sadly we don't
have it yet. We do have "Kameo" and "Gotham City Racer." Both games
look really wonderful. "Kameo" features a twitchy-hipped elf that can
change into a variety of monsters as the situation calls for it. It's
fun, but nothing special. Likewise, "Gotham City Racer" allows users
to race through very -realistic cityscapes with their souped-up hot
cars—surely we're not telling you anything you don't already know about
this. It's a racing game but it looks real good and it's very fast.
If you love racing games then you'll like this racing game better because
it looks better and it's responsive. We run into walls a lot and it
doesn't appeal to us enough for us to try and get better.
Finally there's "Quake 4." This game is very involving
on the Xbox 360. Play it in HD and you're immersed in the creepy crawly
world of monsters and soldiers. Hey, isn't this what it's all about?
It is, and the Xbox 360 will have the edge over Playstation as long
as Microsoft and its partners can continue to roll out the significant
games. So far, they're keeping up with the franchise titles, including
"Madden 2006," "Need for Speed: Most Wanted," "Lucas-Arts' Star Wars:
Battlefront II," and "Call of Duty II."
Personally, we're really kind of wishing for "Dance
Dance Revolution," but that really is another story. 
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