E3 | Microsoft has unveiled a new look Xbox360 GUI, but this was drowned out by the silence of a solution to the 360's audio woes.
It’s easy to assume that E3 is all about the games, but without the necessary hardware to run them we’d be left with a lot of useless $99 drinks coasters. With E3 officially kicking off this Thursday, the pre-E3 announcements are already flowing thick and fast, and Microsoft started the ball rolling at today’s Xbox press conference.
The focus of the presentation was a completely new interface for the 360, due sometime in the Australian Spring. Users are now represented by an onscreen avatar, which initially appears to be a direct copy of the Nintendo Wii’s Mii avatar system. Only this time, they’ve got arms and legs. Woo. Hoo. In slightly more interesting news, gamers will be able to form parties online with up to seven other avatars, and then play games and watch movies together. We’re still unsure how the movie function will work, and the fact that Australia has yet to see the Xbox Live Movie download service at all means this functionality probably won’t hit our shores for quite some time.
Alongside this service is a new Xbox Live! area called Primetime. It’s being billed as a massively multiplayer quiz show, and will be rolled out with the assistance of Endemol, the company behind the quiz show 1 vs 100. Instead of having to head down to your nearest Channel 7 studio to partake in a quiz show and clap when the big red sign tells you to, you’ll be able to do it from the safety of your sofa.
But the biggest news for hardware heads is the move to a whisper-quiet Xbox 360. Don’t rush off to sell your existing 360 on Ebay though, as the answer isn’t a new hardware revision of the console. Instead, Microsoft is updating the operating system to allow games to be installed completely to the hard drive, instead of having to stream from the DVD drive. As any 360 owner can attest, the reason the console can drown out a warehouse full of burning cats is the DVD drive, which spins during most games. By running the game from the hard drive, it cuts out the noisiest part of the console. However, you’ll probably fill your Xbox 360’s measly 20GB hard drive up pretty quickly... so it’s lucky that there’s a new 60GB version due in August.
Wrapping up the 360 hardware news is the introduction of a few new peripherals. A wireless microphone with motion sensing capabilities will arrive with the karaoke title Lips, while green and red versions of the wireless controller are due soon. Yeah, we’re more excited about having a quiet 360 than festive coloured controllers as well...
With Sony’s press conference today, we’ll have plenty of Playstation 3 and PSP info on the way to keep rabid Sony fans happy.