Xbox 360: Let the Games Begin

At A Glance
The future of gaming and digital entertainment arrives with mind-blowing graphics and full surround sound.
From action to adventure, puzzle, racing, sports, and strategy titles so intense they'll leave you staring in awe, it's all on Xbox 360™.

You want it, you got it: blockbuster franchises, must-have exclusives, groundbreaking originals, support from all the major developers you know and love. There's never been a system launching with so many must-have games...
The Xbox is Microsoft's game console, released on November 15, 2001. It is Microsoft's first independent venture into the console arena, after having collaborated with Sega in porting Windows CE to the Sega Dreamcast console. The price is currently 149 USD, 149 EUR, 99 GBP, 200 CAD, 249 AUD, 290 NZD and 1200 NOK. Notable launch titles for the console include Amped, Dead or Alive 3, Halo: Combat Evolved, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee, and Project Gotham Racing.

History

The Xbox was initially developed within Microsoft by a small crew including Seamus Blackley, a game developer and high energy physicist.

While some critics were initially concerned that the Xbox would allow Microsoft to extend its dominance of the PC software market to consoles, as of February 2005 estimates show the Xbox's share of the worldwide console market is ahead of the Nintendo GameCube and far behind the PlayStation 2. Indeed, Xbox for the most part has a similar (but smaller) selection of the teen-adult games than the Playstation 2 has, with Xbox's advantages mainly being in performance, graphics and sound. Some poor first-party games did damage the intial reputation of the Xbox, leading to the impression that the Xbox emphasized hardware graphics over game design. Also, Xbox did have trouble getting top notch console-exclusive games, a strategy with the Grand Theft Auto (series) that made the PlayStation 2 very successful. In 2002-2003, the Xbox Live online service was successfully launched and several best-selling and critically-acclaimed titles for the Xbox were released, such as Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, putting the Xbox on par with its rivals with quality gaming. The exclusivity deal with Sony was amended to include the Xbox after Xbox sales improved, making it too good of a market for GTA's publisher to pass up.

Some consider the Xbox's freshman forey into the console market particularly successful in spite of the established dominance of PlayStation 2 whose market lead had been due to the original PlayStation base, and compared to the GameCube which has failed to match the sales of its Nintendo 64 predecessor. In fact, the Xbox's success is remarkable despite the excessive criticism directed at it during its first year of launch, which was often expected since Xbox was the newcomer to the video game industry and because of Microsoft's less-than stellar reputation. Much of that was later found to be unwarranted bias, such as when the Xbox unfairly recieves extra attention for poor titles (often subpar graphics, or graphics over design), more so than the PlayStation 2 which overall had more low-rated titles overall.

The Xbox has not sold well in Japan, due to the Japanese people's poor acceptance of non-Japanese consoles, limited Japanese developer support, few game choices and the large size of the hardware itself. In much of Europe, the Xbox is currently slightly ahead of the GameCube, but is still far behind the PlayStation 2. Microsoft predicted that it would not make a profit on the Xbox for at least three years and that turned out to be correct; the division had its first profitable quarter in 2005.

In November 2002, Microsoft released the successful Xbox Live online gaming service, allowing subscribers to play online Xbox games with (or against) other subscribers all around the world and download new content for their games to the hard drive. This online service only works with broadband. The milestone of 1 million subscribers was announced in July 2004.

Several internal hardware revisions have been made to discourage modding (all of which have been defeated by updated modchip designs or installation procedures), cut manufacturing costs, and to provide a more reliable DVD-ROM drive (the early units' drives were prone to failure).

Hardware
Microsoft built the Xbox around industry-standard PC hardware, unlike the traditionally proprietary design of nearly all other gaming consoles.

The inclusion of the hard disk not only serves as a disk cache for faster game loading times,it also allows users to download new content for their games from Xbox Live and copy music from standard Audio CDs so players can replace the soundtrack of Xbox games.

Although the Xbox is based on commodity PC hardware and runs a stripped-down version of the Windows 2000 kernel using APIs based largely on DirectX, it incorporates restrictions designed to prevent uses not approved by Microsoft. The Xbox does not use Windows CE due to Microsoft internal politics at the time, as well as limited support in Windows CE for DirectX.

The Xbox itself is much larger and heavier than its contemporaries. Mostly, this is due to a large tray-loading DVD-ROM drive and the standard-size 3.5" hard drive. Despite managing to be smaller and lighter than similar commodity PCs, the Xbox has found itself a target of mild derision, as gamers poke fun at it for things like a warning in the Xbox manual that a falling Xbox "could cause serious injury" to a small child or pet. While some elements of the Xbox's design, like break-away cables for the controllers to prevent the console from being yanked from the shelf, take the size into account, it has undoubtedly hurt the system's sales to the space-conscious Japanese.

Another common complaint about the system was that the original game controller design was seen as too large for some people. For the Japanese Xbox launch, a new and smaller controller was introduced, a design which was subsequently released in other markets as the "Controller S", which eventually replaced the original design. Currently, all Xbox consoles come with a "Controller S", and the original version of the controller (also known as 'The Duke') is no longer sold.

The source of this article is Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL

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