Adventures in NextGen land
So my 360 is up and running nicely unlike the many people whose systems are displaying errors or crashing during games. From what I gather from the forums, the Hard Drive and Power Brick (huge honking brick that it is) seem to be the causes of a lot of problems.
I’ve got a few beefs with the system itself but overall the experience is enjoyable and has made great leaps over previous generation gaming systems. First of all Microsoft has implemented a new micropayment system called Microsoft Points for use with the Xbox Live marketplace to buy things like full versions of Xbox Live Arcade games, themes, new avatars and such. This brings me to my first beef: you can’t preview themes or avatars before you buy them. Sure they’re cheap: 20 points for a picture and 150 for a theme but at the exchange rate of 100 points to $1.55 USD things can get expensive fast. I made the mistake of wasting 150 points on a Penny Arcade theme which is next to impossible to see anythign on thanks to its busy background. Sure it’s only 2 bucks and change but you don’t quite realize that when you’re clicking away with your controller.
Another thing that irks me is that while the Xbox Live Marketplace is well done you can’t queue up things to be downloaded so you could walk away and come back with a couple of trailers and demos downloaded and also while downloading you’re stuck on the download ‘tab’. I can see not being able to play full on Xbox 360 games but they should let you do other things like use the MediaCenter functionality or play Arcade Games. I don’t know about you but sitting in front of my TV and waiting for a progress bar to hit 100% is not my idea of NextGen entertainment. I pity those with <5mbit broadband, the trailers and demos are going to take a fair bit of time for you to download when they each weigh in at 100-600mb.
Lastly the other thing that cheeses me off is that the 360 has great media capabilities, as it well should but Microsoft has decided that they don’t want you to be able to play videos from your computer. Sure you can view pictures or play music (which I must say is VERY well done) from your computer but video playback is limited to playing content from a PC running Windows Media Center Edition on the local network. I don’t have access to a Media Center PC so I don’t know what it can and can’t play but I assume it only supports MPEG and MS’s own DVR-MS format that it uses to record shows from live tv. Come on Microsoft let us play all of our media!. I’ll gladly not hack my 360 when it becomes doable if you just let my play my XviDs from my PC.
UPDATE: So I got my hands on Windwos Media Center Edition 2005 and installed it in Virtual PC to then find out that the XBOX Media Center Extender only supports playing MPEG-1, MPEG-2, DVR-MS and WMV formats. Right now the only way to play your XviDs is to transcode them into a supported format. Too bad more wasn’t known about the WMV format, you could probably just re-wrap the MPEG-4 video stream and transcode the audio instead of re-encoding the whole thing.
