Xbox 360 - It's Here & It's On

Our detailed impressions and obligatory photo overload is here, as Kikizo's Xbox 360s arrive. Has it really been worth all the hype? Let's see, in our definitive feature.

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The first thing you need to do before using the console properly is sync your wireless controller to the Xbox 360 unit. It takes a little while at first but basically, pressing the big X start button on the controller sets the process going. The lights on the main machine's power button flash around to assign you as Player 1, and the "top left" portion of the "ring of light" will remain evident on both the console and your controller.

Additional players will also have to sync their controllers, and get the next part of the circle. It's pretty cool, and so much better than plugging leads in everywhere. You can actually walk around playing the game, and even avoid those tricky "tripping on controller lead causes console to fall in fishbowl!" type incidents (you know who you are).

The controllers themselves are likewise wonderfully built, and ever since E3, have been pretty unanimously regarded as the best console controller ever made. An extremely solid feel, perfectly placed buttons with the right level of resistance and perfect thumbstick spring-back, superb triggers (both the main analogue triggers and the clicky ones (LB and RB, placed just above) feel almost perfect, although sometimes it's easy to press them when you don't really mean to (try Xbox 1 Ninja Gaiden on Xbox 360 and you'll see what we mean with a menu coming up when you don't want it to!) but the whole unit is comfortable to hold with good ergonomic shape and grip, and of course, it's compact and classy. The wireless controllers also rumble pretty decently considering they're battery powered, and they auto power-off after a period of inactivity, which is a good battery-saving feature, regardless of whether you're using the AA battery pack or the rechargeable battery pack - and a simple press of the controller's 'X' on-button means you're back in action.

The Xbox 360 then asks you about the basic settings for your machine. Username, language, time zone, display aspect ratio and resolution. These options cal all be revisited again in the System tab. The output options are pretty good; you can obviously select between normal and widescreen aspect ratios, and separately define what resolution you'd like if you're HDTV-ready - either 480p, 720p and 1080i. On this PAL machine, vitally, you can also choose between PAL-50 or PAL-60.

However, as with the original Xbox systems, it would be nice if this retail machine offered the more expansive and advanced options that the debug system affords industry users, for example being able to freely select NTSC signal for some reason, other resolutions, and well, OK, you wouldn't be able to select Game or DVD regions like you can in the debug, but we can still dream...

The front end is clean, concise, easy to navigate and very easy on the eye. Four main colour-coded sections are the basis for your fiddlings; Xbox Live (orange), Games (blue), Media (green) and System (purple). A subtle moving effect seen in the background, visible in many of the video snippets we've brought you in past Xbox 360 video features, complements the complete feel of this comprehensive Guide through Xbox 360.

One central component of the front end is your Profile, which comprises your Reputation score, Gamerscore, and also your ability Zone - i.e. if you're want to say you're a 'Pro' you'll get tougher opponents and 'Family' will give you, presumably, crapper players to play against.

The newly revamped Xbox Live is even more integral to 360's front end than before. You automatically sign in and the whole system really does feel (just like they promised) that it revolves around 'you' and your online profile. You can check your messages, add friends to your friends list, and more importantly, get down to the Xbox Live Marketplace - the best new thing about Live that enables you to download playable demos, trailers, and customisable backgrounds based on different games for your front-end's theme. This stuff costs money though, but using a very fairly priced "Microsoft Points" system allows you to top up on credits and spend on all this junk at will. A great value proposition, and there's some cool stuff in here that the IP owners (both first- and thirdparty) are bound to love the spin-off revenue from.

Now we've had the chance to test it all, we know it works really well. Unlike a PC user experience, this is all relatively foolproof. We downloaded a 500MB demo of the new NBA LIVE in a few minutes; you just fire it up with a single click, and you're away. Seamless, easy, and great to see what titles you might want to buy. You can easily check out your Download History, Featured Downloads, and more. We'd like to see a few more playable demos available for launch, but of course, that's all maybe still to be added, with a few days still to go until consumers get their new Xboxes (unlike us, did we mention we have one already?).

And because Live is so much more intimidatingly central to the Xbox 360 front-end, it doesn't seem all that far-fetched that Microsoft aims to get the majority of 360 users subscribed to Live. With a month's free trial in the box, good pricing options for beyond the first month, and considering how easy and rewarding it all is, it's surely just going to be a no-brainer for anyone with a credit card.

The Games tab does pretty much what you'd expect; as well as accessing data on your Achievements in various Xbox 360 titles you've played, you access your current game from here, and can also get to the promising Xbox Live Arcade option, which will offers tonnes of simpler (but highly addictive) titles for you to waste time on against other Live users.

What about the Media playing aspect of Xbox 360? We've had very mixed feeling so far, to be quite blunt. While everything that works, works very well, it doesn't let you do the things you really want to do, and which you can already do on your chipped Xbox 1 (or your laptop, which for now, will have to remain the hub of our digital lifestyle). Firstly, regarding music playback, this is all pretty much fine; you can listen to music stored on the Xbox 360's own hard disc (with a selection of music pre-loaded for you o test out), and you can also connect any music device to one of the 360's three USB ports and play music off of there. You also have the option to stream music from your PC via direct Ethernet cable connection, or by hooking up the 360's wireless adapter, which attaches to the back of the 360 console and plugs into the console's conveniently located rear USB port. Whether or not you actually get it to work is another matter...

Here's where we started to have problems. Firstly, it wasn't particularly easy took get our Xbox 360 to talk to our PC in the first place, and it took some time to get things working. In the end, we got it working via the Ethernet cable connection, and then you have to install Windows Media Connect (which works on Windows XP Service Pack 2 or higher) in order to hopefully start streaming music to the Xbox 360. Widows Media Connect is a small download (available here) and easy enough to get going, but for some reason our 360 didn't get its ass in gear very quickly in welcoming aboard the PC connection, even though all the settings on the PC's WMC were apparently sorted out properly. This is the sort of inconvenience that PC users will deal with all day with software, but which console users might just give up with after five minutes of trying. Update: Microsoft has also released an Xbox 360 setup tool for your PC here).

The next issue is that we can't get anything wireless working for love nor money - you have to disconnect the Ethernet cable so that the wireless adapter to becomes the primary communicator, which is fine. But then, things seem to be in a world of their own. There is an option on your PC to automatically export all network settings data to a USB device and then transfer these settings to 360 via USB, making everything just work magically - supposedly. Well, erm, we've tried, and it's still not working. So we'll have to get the Microsoft techies on the case at some point, because everyone knows that no wires is better than stupid silly wires.

The next gripe is that you can't copy any music to your 360 via these streaming channels. The only way we can see to do this is by actually taking an original music CD inserted into the 360 and ripping the music in the same way you'd do with Windows Media Player 10 or the first Xbox. Insert an audio CD, and mercifully, it auto-detects and starts playing, and then you can easily rip away. But why not through these other devices? It should just let us do what we want!

On the plus side, the 360's intelligent playlist creation and browsing system is pretty good, automatically creating lists of tunes based on genre and so on, if the files are tagged accordingly. Also, the visualisation software, designed by Jeff Minter, creates really funky images while music it's playing and is probably the best consumer-level visualisation thingy ever made. Not that we've ever seen many apart from those in WMP, but it's probably the best ever, regardless. It goes with the music really well and you can spin stuff around with the thumsticks - cool.

Otherwise though, the music, photo and video viewing tools are very basic, and will not satisfy users of something like even older versions of Windows Media Player for the PC. You don't appear to be able to fast forward videos that are on the hard disc. You can't zoom on photos for crying out loud. And the music playing options are also limited - again, not even a fast forward option. Pretty weak - and something MS should definitely consider upgrading via Xbox Live if possible.

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