The X Box 360 Gaming Revolution
The Xbox 360 is one of the most important products for Microsoft
this year and it has your living room squarely in its sights. It
has even been described as the second coming of Sega's
Dreamcast! This new Xbox is smaller than the original and its
wireless features, along with its stylishly concave shape, make
it fit nicely into the living room, a very welcome change from
the standard X Box. In fact, it's about 20% smaller than the
original and the console can either rest on its end or on its
side. The sides are "sucked in" and the power button is
oversized and surrounded by a ring of glowing green light.
Finally, the color of the console is a soft white, compared to
the harsh black color of the original that really made it stand
out.
As far as the technology the X Box incorporates, all of its
hardware is custom-made from the ground up. It also features a
custom graphics chip designed by NVIDIA, which is not entirely
dissimilar to the GeForce 3. This graphics chip is the most
powerful of any other game console. As you may know,
graphics-intense applications such as video games are in fact
mathematically-intense applications so the graphics chip of a
game console can perform is of crucial importance to the gaming
performance it can deliver. In fact, the whole purpose of
graphics chips is to aid in the mathematical computations so if
for example a circle needs to be drawn, the processor passes the
circle's center and radius to the graphics chip and the graphics
chip does all the computations, rather than have the processor
create the circle's surface pixel by pixel. What the X Box does
is delivering PC-level processing power to your living room. Far
more than a game console, the X Box 360 is in fact, a total
media
center.
So how exactly is that PC-level power integrated in what looks
like a game console? Well, first of all, it uses MTEC technology
to liquid cool the hardware, so as to avoid noisy fans. CoolIT,
the vendor of X Box 360 cooling system claims it's a unique
solution that gives more stable performance and better
temperatures. The X Box also has a built-in hard drive used to
save games and download goodies off of Xbox Live. As you might
have guessed, it also features an Ethernet connection port which
gives it built-in broadband capability. It also supports
wireless connectivity for up to 4 different controllers. The
controllers can actually act as full remote controls and turn
the X Box on and off. Apart from that, the device also has three
USB ports and three memory slots, with memory units starting at
64MB.
As far as what games you can play on the X Box 360, Electronic
Arts announced the largest commitment in its history to Xbox
360. Other key industry publishers announced that there are more
than 160 X Box 360 games already in development! These new X Box
360 games, Microsoft says, will be making better use of the X
Box 360's advanced video and audio capabilities. It also seems
that while PS3 games will be at around $80, X Box 360 games are
at around $50! Currently, most X Box 360 games are ports from
the standard xbox and don't fully utilize the console's advanced
capabilities. Even the first crop of X Box 360 games is expected
not to take full advantage of some of X Box 360's features.
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Written by: James Hayes
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