goLUCKY

Price Update

Get Me Coffee

See what they did there? Xbox 360, $360. Cute.

Think I'll wait until it's called Xbox 199

Gallant Pig

$60 for the HDD? Not bad at all. I'll be going with that one. I hate memory cards.

Chris_D

Some changes I note from previous rumours. 3.2 ghz cores instead of 2ghz, and now 512 ram instead of 256. Nice if true.

Chris_D

cmon, it's really only a bit of a stretch to count the elder scrolls game as fps, to make it 4/4

Apollo

AMEN!!!! To that brother!!!!!

edstein

That Dark Sector Trailer looks cool.

MasterofDVD

I have no problems with the 360.00 price at all. I wish I could run out now and preorder somewhere.

I'm glad to hear that rolling over a Live account to the new system is possible. I didn't think they would screw all the Live subscribers over but you never know. I also love the idea of downloadable demos.

Centurion

720P gaming goodness on my widescreen with 5.1 surround.
Can hardly wait.

While not an "official announcement", the hardware list looks good for $300.
Another $60 for the 20GB harddrive and Tivo functionality...sweet!

vd0man

^^ FAKED Perfect Dark Zero screenshot (see later post) ^^

vd0man

Oh yea, here's the supposed official Xbox 360 Specs:
(source)

2 types of Xbox Live:
Xbox Live Silver (no subscription required)
Xbox Live Gold (subscription benefits)

Features for Gold service
* Also for Silver
# Also for Offline

- Seamless transition to Xbox Live account from Xbox to Xbox 360
- Access to MMOs (additional fees may apply) *
- Free Xbox Live weekends *
- Multiplayer online gameplay
- Avatar for gamer profile * #
- Motto for gamer profile * #
- Personalized look for Xbox System Guide * #
- Offline achievments * #
- Online achievements *
- Access to other players' Gamer cards via Live *
- Cumulative gamer score * #
- Location/language profile * #
- Reputation *
- Enahnced matchmaking using above
- Skill level matchmaking
- Gameplay style profile (casual, competitive, etc.)
- Recent players list *
- Free and premium download game content *
- Free and premium downloadable movies, music, tv *
- Downloadable demos/trailers *
- Microtransactions *
- Custom playlist in every game * #
- Play music from portable devices * #
- View images from digital camera * #
- Strem media from Windows XP * #
- Interactive screen savers * #
- Track info for CDs * #
- Communication with voice, video or text *

360 Hardware:
1. Support for DVD-video, DVD-Rom, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, CD-Rom, CD-R, CD-RW, WMA CD, MP3 cd, JPEG photo CD
2. All games supported at 16:9, 720p and 1080i, anti-aliasing
3. Customizable face plates to change appearance
4. 3 USB 2.0 ports
5. Support for 4 wireless controllers
6. Detachable 20GB drive
7. Wi-Fi ready

Custom IBM PowerPC-based CPU
- 3 symmetrical cores at 3.2 GHz each
- 2 hardware threads per core
- 1 VMX-128 vector unit per core
- 1 MB L2 cache

CPU Game Math Performance
- 9 billion dots per second

Custom ATI Graphics Processor
- 500 MNz
- 10 MB embedded DRAM
- 48-way parallel floating-point shader pipelines
- unified shader architecture

Memory
-512 MB GDDR3 RAM
- 700 MNz DDR

Memory Bandwidth
- 22.4 GB/s memory interface bus bandwidth
- 256 GB/s memory bandwidth to EDRAM
- 21.6 GB/s frontside bus

Audio
- Mulitchannel surround sond output
- Supports 48khz 16-bit audio
- 320 independent decompression channels
- 32 bit processing
- 256+ audio channels

Terrell

Just one simple question. If it's basically a computer, why not just by a computer that will last longer, is upgradeable, and has more kickass games than any console, period.

joshd2012

Well, this time, it isn't basically a computer. The first Xbox - that was a computer. This is more specialized for gaming.

Perfect Dark Zero looks like... well... Half Life 2. Am I supposed to be impressed?

Chris_D

It's closest relative is probably a mac g5 desktop, show me one of those for $300 and I'll buy it . Also I'd rather buy a brand new machine every few years for $300 than spend twice that upgrading my pc. The games thing is a matter of taste.

Hell it probably even looks sexier than a g5 .

BeanDip0001

HOLY CRAP!!!! that is 3 times as many pipelines as a top of the line PC X800XT card. this thing is going to be able to draw real people with that kinda subsystem. "hello new xbox please draw me Jenna Haze: Thank you"

BeanDip0001

hmmmmmmmm i don't see halo 2 on any computer, or most of the other games i would like to play. and the halo pc was a screwed version of the xbox halo. don't get me wrong the games on pc that are good i have, but the good games are hardly ever on pc. and if you think half life 2 compares to halo 2 in any way i want some of the drugs you're on.

PixyJunket

Every video game system ever made is basically a computer.

joshd2012

It has been suggested that the X logo button the controller is to switch between 4 wireless channels (hense the 1-4 printed around it). That that means a total of... wait for it... 4 controllers in one general area. LAN parties (or if you happen to live too close to your neighbors Xbox360) will have to resort to the wired alternative.

goLUCKY

Now I see what you were talking about.

jeffdsmith

I seriously doubt it. If MS is good at one thing in the software world, its copying others ideas. I think the same will continue to hold true for hardware. If Nintendo has allready managed 16 channels (32 when combining different WB generations) I'm sure MS will build in more then 4 channels.

Noonan

I agree. That's probably just to select which player that controller is for. Since there is no controller ports to plug a receiver into, there has to be some way to tell who each player is. I'm sure there will be another selector for different channels.

Michael Corvin

So what happened to the cell shaded Perfect Dark? This is like Zelda in reverse. I was expecting one thing and looking forward to it and they go the opposite direction. I haven't played XIII but I thought it could have been an interesting way to take the FPS genre. Especially with an established franchise. If one game can be considered a franchise.

PixyJunket

Wow, Perfect Dark looks so.. standard.

Centurion

Well, I don't think Halo 2 owns in all departments. They both look great since they were optimized for their respective platforms. I mean, for something that's 480 lines of resolution Halo 2 is awesome. But it was designed for a device that outputs in 480. The edges of objects look blurrier (is this a word?) when playing it on a 720 or 1080 HDTV. This is why I pull out my Sony SDTV tube to play it. On the other hand, Half Life looks so sweet in 768 lines and higher resolution.
Sound goes to Halo 2. Right from the beginning the orchestration of the soundtrack and main theme are quite memorable. I'm sure you can hum Halo's main theme song if you wanted to. I can't even tell you what Half Life 2 sounds like.
The Havok engine is so damn good I think the game was designed just to show it off. I mean, size, weight, buoyancy, friction, distance, angle of projection, etc. All these things come into play in Half Life 2 and are believable. Now lets look at Halo 2...the MC feels like he is floating when he jumps.
Gameplay, well, I had more fun dual wielding in Halo 2 than I did with the gravity gun in Half Life 2. The gravity gun just got interesting for the last couple of levels but it was already a little too late.

I can always give you the number to my pharmacist if you're still interested.

Centurion

Right. It makes me laugh when people say that, however, I think the term "computer" is loosely used.
Still, when the Xbox is compared to a PC as having similar traits, I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.