10:46 pm - Xbox360 explosion
Ok so those of you geeky enough to watch the Xbox360 unveiling on MTV were probably as disappointed as I was. If you happened to miss it… don’t worry you didn’t miss anything worth while. I knew the show was doomed for failure when they showed 20 seconds of quick blurry shots of the console (think MTV cribs style) then went on to show the Killers playing for 3 minutes. Please tell me why MTV never plays music except when you really don’t want them to… WHY IS THAT?
Anyway along with the MTV unveiling an explosion of information became available. Remember OurColony.net that I talked about a while back… well it “ended” an hour before the MTV thing with a video unveiling the console to the die-hard fans who have been following it up to this point. Way more informative than the MTV crap.
In addition to the OurColony Video, Microsoft made an official press release about the Xbox 360, IGN released an official interview, and www.xbox360.com launched which includes a car-point type exploration of the console and controller, also the old official Xbox site hosts an official Xbox360 fact sheet.
I’m sure if you’re really dying to see the MTV crap you can find a pirate stream of it somewhere, but trust me it’s not worth it. I think the only really cool part (for me anyway) was when they lined up all of the Xbox360 prototypes that led up to their final design. From an ID perspective it was really cool to see the progression, if only for a few seconds. The rest of it was somewhat entertaining but completely useless for any kind of factual information or insights into the next Xbox console.
One thing that remains up in the air is Backwards Compatibility (BC: the ability to play Xbox games you own now on the new Xbox 360 console). Personally having some fairly deep knowledge of emulators and getting consoles to do things they were not designed to do, I have no doubt that Microsoft already has BC up and fully functional, the real drawback is licensing and royalties. nVidia makes the GPU (graphics processing unit) for the current Xbox while ATI will be making the GPU for the Xbox 360. So nVidia would “officially” have to release technical information to their biggest competitor with Microsoft paying the handsome ransom in the process. So it comes down to cost/benefit. will the added user-base for that feature be more profitable than the cost of paying off nVidia so ATI can legally use their protocols? It’s a thin line. Sony (who will be releasing the Playstation 3 Console) has claimed they will be BC with PS2 games, similarly Nintendo (who will be releasing the Nintendo Revolution Console) has claimed they will be BC with GameCube games. This would leave Microsoft as the only company without this feature. Considering the projected release date for the Xbox 360 is August (three months earlier than my projection and the only account I was wrong on so far) and Nintendo and Sony wont be releasing until late 2006 it wont be an issue right away but very well may down the line.
In the mean time… I can’t friggin wait to get my hands on this thing 
EDIT: there is another ourcolony video that is just as if not more informative than the first. http://games.kikizo.com/news/200505/101.asp
