U JUST BOUGHT DIS XBOX

Thursday, May 12, 2005 » gaming thought

I just got back from the first 15 minutes of MTV's world exclusive unveiling of the Xbox 360. I was watching it mostly to humor them, but what I saw just reinforces this idea that Microsoft and the Xbox are moving away from the concept I've always had of the gaming industry and its spectrum of demographics and into some bizarro dimension where people only play Halo, Dead or Alive, and EA games.

As if the fact that they selected MTV as the staging ground wasn't enough indication of their new target audience, the opening minute offered a few more nudges in that direction. I may have been a few moments late tuning in, but the first actual event footage I saw was Frodo Baggins Kevin heralding "the future of gaming!" Then some model walks out carrying a laptop bag, from which she removes the same box that's been on the Internet fot weeks now. She places it on a stand, the camera zooms around it as some green lasers go off, and then they cut to The Killers performing.

At this point I switched back to watching parts of Spartan on one of the cable channels. (You go, Val. You pull that scarecrow switcheroo.) I turned back to MTV in time to see one of the guys from Pimp My Ride airbrushing a skull onto the top of the original Xbox. I turned it off after he instructed his audience to "check out the bling."

It's clear that Microsoft is forging a completely different path for this next console generation than Nintendo's plan to innovate game design. Most of the new features they're touting (HD, Xbox Live... console skins?) are more tweaks to the delivery of the medium and not the games themselves. But that should be fine with their MTV crowd. Bring on Need for Speed: 3 Fast 3 Furious!

Also, maybe they explained this in the latter portion of the program, but what's the significance of the 360 name, anyway? I was half expecting the console to be a sphere.

[Post script: I had this semi-objective observation, but couldn't figure out where to insert it into all the jaded rambling above, so here you go: Gamespot's saying that you can use the wireless controllers to turn the console off. That's actually pretty cool. Bonus points if the controller also turns the thing on.]