MTV are hosting a special show on the XBox 360, and more and more details about the console are emerging online. The show airs tonight in the U.S., and tomorrow in Ireland and the U.K. Eurogamer have continuously updated coverage here.
Much of the information is speculation based on leaked images, or images from ourcolony, but scans of a Danish gaming magazine seem to confirm much of the speculation. The main points that have emerged so far are:
- The name is definitley XBox 360.
- The controllers will be wireless, and rechargable via USB connectors on the XBox, or can take standard batteries too.
- The controllers will rumble – what will this do to the battery life?
- There will be up to 3 USB connectors on the box.
- It will come with built-in Wi-Fi.
- Widescreen, HDTV (720p, 1080i), Dolby Digital output as standard.
- There will be an optional hard drive, though it’s unclear whether there will be a 20GB disk as standard. Images of a 40GB disk have been seen on ourcolony.
- It’s likely that it will integrate with Windows Media Centre – perhaps streaming audio and/or video from your PC.
- New XBox Live options – silver and gold levels (details here at Eurogamer).
Most importantly, it looks like Halo 3 will be a launch title, and that Bungie have been working away at it since Halo 2 was completed. Now, Bungie have not confirmed that, and until I hear it from the horse’s mouth, I won’t be counting any chickens (to mix my metaphors!). However, Halo 3 as a launch title would make a huge amount of sense.
I always felt that Halo 2’s graphics engine was written with the next generation console in mind. As anyone who has played Halo 2 will have noticed, the cutscenes generated using the in-game graphics engine have a noticeable delay when the scene changes. Objects start with low levels of detail, and then the bump maps etc. are applied. It takes a while, and you can easily notice the level of detail increasing. This said to me that the algorithms were written so that the performance would be acceptable for the XBox, but would look really great on the next-gen XBox.
It looks like I’ll only have to wait till November, since apparently the XBox 360 will be released in Europe a week after the U.S. I expect that the price will be around €400, and there’s been speculation that game prices will increase with the arrival of the next-gen consoles. I don’t know whether I could wait till Christmas, and if Halo 3 is available at launch, then there’s no question – form an orderly queue behind me now!