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Microsoft Unveils Smaller Xbox 360 Model, Kinect Details
E3 kicked off today, and Microsoft took advantage of its early keynote presentation to show off a ton of new games and features for the Xbox 360. The biggest news for the very near future is that they're releasing a smaller, revamped version of the console, with immediate availability. It's black, it comes with a 250GB HDD and built-in 802.11n Wi-Fi support, and it's priced at $299. Microsoft also put a release date on Kinect, the motion control scheme formerly known as Project Natal: November 4 in the US. It will launch with 15 games, mostly casual-oriented, several of which were demonstrated on-stage. Many new Kinect features were shown as well, such as the dashboard interface, video chat (with support for playing movies both parties can watch), and a partnership with ESPN to provide live and on-demand sports, all controllable with hand gestures and voice commands. (It presently includes college football and basketball, soccer, the NBA, and MLB.) Also notable is a partnership with LucasArts for a Kinect Star Wars game, a fitness game from Ubisoft, and a Forza racing game that uses Kinect and allows players to inspect the cars with an impressive level of detail. Engadget's liveblog of the event has a bunch of pictures from the demonstrations, or you can read a more detailed play-by-play at Ars.
This is just embarrassing to watch. The Kinetic stuff looks is not only looks as un-fun as any gaming thing possibly could be, it is also getting torn apart by people closely watching the demos and seeing the horrendous lag and inaccuracy.
And five years after the Red Ring of Death plagued Xbox 360 launched they are releasing a 300 dollar smaller unit.
Let me guess Microsoft, you claim this one has finally fixed the worst console hardware design in history and in a smaller form factor. Yeah, right...
Custom kinect port = it uses some proprietary connector so you won't be able to use it with anything else, will it even be possible to connect it to an original 360?
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No blu-ray, no new features, smaller, and positioned as a must-buy?
Gee, where have I seen this before? I know I have seen similar restylings that offered no real improvement.
Where is Blu-ray? I know, Ballmer, offering blu-ray would be admitting you were wrong, but getting Windows 7 out so quickly after the monstrosity known as "Vista" is a pretty loud admission that you do fuck up now and then. You're only compounding it by not embracing blu-ray while the rest of the world already has.
I'll admit, I do want an XBox 360, and while it's nice the power supply, wifi, and HDD are all now internal, what I am waiting on is blu-ray. I want it more as a media extender/STB more than anything else, primarily for Hulu and Netflix, and possibly for Rockband 3 once the "real" keyboard comes out.
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I'll admit, I was really impressed with the linked video. Until I watched it again and realized that it's faked. The person "controlling" the action isn't quite in sync with what's on screen. Sometimes the actor is slightly ahead of the "game" (could be lag, I thought) and other times isn't keeping up with what's on screen.
Even the linked video comments that the video is likely a scripted demo. But I'm not convinced it's real yet. (I'm sure it works, but clearly not ready for prime-time, nor even E3.)