New Parental Controls Limit Xbox Time

An anonymous reader writes "As part of a new marketing blitz to promote the Xbox 360 as a "family friendly" video game console, Microsoft on Wednesday rolled out a new feature called Family Timer, which will show up in the Family Settings Screen. The Timer will let parents limit the number of hours their kids can play the Xbox on a daily or weekly basis. When the time limit is reached, the console will automatically shut off, ostensibly after saving the game."

Comments

Re:not the root of the problem...

[vishbar]

It's not only good for parents. It's also good for those of us who have busy schedules and short attention spans...set the timer to 1 hour, play away, and no risk of losing track of the clock. I learned this with WoW.

Shutdown mechanism?

[grantek]

Actual software quality aside, I'd hope Microsoft is using its experience with OSes to implement this sudden shutdown has a suspend-to-disk type operation (or suspend to RAM if all else fails) - many games aren't designed around constant save points, and if these things are going to throw away hours of hard-earned work, I can see tons more kids going postal in the future :/