360 degrees of HOLY ^%$#@

Ok, so I watched the MTV half hour special, and quite frankly, was less than impressed. They were very sketchy about ANY details, the celebs obviously had no clue (except maybe Elijah Wood, as he has a reputation as a gamer), and while Perfect Dark Zero sounded incredibly awesome, we barely got to really see any of it (and none of the others games showed anything that would qualify as impressive gameplay graphics). In essence, it was like any other MTV "special" full of flash and completely lacking in any sort of actual substance. It was smart of MS to appeal to the mainstream like that, so I don't fault them for going to MTV and using a bunch of celebrities that couldn't tell an Xbox from a toaster oven, but that isn't going to sell me, the hardcore gamer who if you get his attention will sell blood and undergo experiments if that's what it takes to be able to afford a system.
But what did really get me excited was IGN's very detailed 6 page article devoted to all the ins and outs of the Xbox 360. I'm not much of a techhead, so things like processor power won't actually mean anything to me until I actually see what it can do in actual gameplay, but all the nifty little bits got me very excited. Although it's almost assured there will be multiple versions of xbox available, the core unit itself will most definitely come with a massive hard drive, and most are expecting a base price point of $300 for that system. The ones fully decked out will probably be significantly more, but If 300 is all I'm paying and it plays games and my dvds, I'll be extremely pleased. The features I like most are that I can just transfer over my xbox live service with no problem and I can upload tracks from my ipod (which is something I have badly wanted to do since I got my shuffle).

But there are still some issues. While I obviously see the convienence of wireless controllers, depending on battery life, keeping those suckers powered could easily eat up a lot of money very quickly. I'm hoping there's some sort of alternative option at launch if not soon after.

Backwards compatibility also hasn't been answered one way or the other. I think at this point it would be a wise idea since that would instantly give us gamers a good variety of Xbox live games if nothing else, because we really don't know what launch titles will be available.

Which leads me to my next issue-Launch games. Aside from the obvious sports titles, nothing has been officially tagged, not even Perfect Dark Zero (although if that doesn't launch with the system, it may be lacking a much needed killer app, so it's 99.9% likely), and none of the the current generation of consoles had a particularly solid launch lineup. It was usually one really good game and it took awhile for all the systems before solid games started coming out at a regular rate (and it never really happened for Gamecube, there's really only one good game every 6 months for that system).

So, while I'm not officially on the Xbox bandwagon, I will probably be eating Cup O' Noodles for the next 7 months so I can have enough to splurge if I really want to....