Xbox 360: Great looking games, but what does it do?

YOU GOTTA love the PR hype and mud slinging that goes on during the run up to a really, really major competitive product launch. Sony and Microsoft are at loggerheads over their upcoming next-generation releases, and while we have all the tech specs (relatively) nailed and the hype about what will make each console Gods Gift to 14 Year Olds, what about the actual direction in which the two companies are pulling their franchises?
I attended an Xbox 360 briefing in my native Dublin last night and as well as seeing the pretty colours and the lovely logo plastered across the screens in front of me I had a chance to sit down - well, more stand around - with Xbox’s head honcho in the UK & Ireland Stephen McGill, and during our discussions he enlightened me as to where Microsoft thinks it's going with the Xbox 360.

First and foremost, the Xbox 360 is the centrepiece of Microsoft’s design to catch younger gamers with its media centre experience, making Microsoft the centrepiece of the living room by controlling everything from gaming to music to films.

It wants the Xbox 360 to be able to hook up to everything from iPods to PSPs and make it the centrepiece of the living room as opposed to simply the games console for the kids stashed underneath or on top of the TV.

Connectivity is Microsoft’s new aim and it will be providing a basic version of its Xbox Live! service free of charge to all users. This will allow players to interact by doing things such as chatting and listening to music together, and players on the "Gold" version of the service, which we were told will be priced roughly the same as the current Xbox service, will be able to play games and track stats.

Players will have identity cards that will allow them to track the likes of friends easily as well as find similarly skilled opponents for play. This will also allow parents to control who their children interact with online, and the strict family filtering systems that Microsoft has lined up for the Xbox 360 will give total parental control over what types of games their kids play, who they play them with and how much coffee they drink. Or something like that.

On the matter of the competition, McGill admitted that Sony has a strong product in the PlayStation 3, saying that it’s like comparing two Ferraris when squaring them off against one another. He believes however that Microsoft has the stronger product in terms of how it uses its system, with the XML development standard providing a much easier framework in which developers can make their games over the PS3.

There may be some credence to this idea as Sony did buy the standardised and relatively easy-to-use Unreal 3 engine for sublicensing during the week, but at the same time the man is PR for the Xbox 360 so we’ll wait to see what developers themselves say about the two systems.

We’ll see what happens in the coming weeks as the pre-launch hype machine gears up a notch, though McGill did leave me feeling pretty confident about the Xbox 360’s ability to succeed. Whether or not this means the console will deliver the goods or if the man simply deserves a bonus for making me feel so warm and fuzzy on the inside remains to be seen, but he did give me a lot of new things to think about over and beyond how many teraflops the console can pull out of the hat. µ