Microsoft’s Gaming Baby Gets a New Soul, Same Body

Microsoft announced many an upgrade to their beloved XBox 360 yesterday at E3.  It turns out that The 360 is getting a shiny new dashboard, complete with a gamercard to show off your sick stats in a flashy way, an avatar to express a customizable (with clothing…), digital version of yourself (Mii?!), and a completely different graphical user interface.  Yay?  I’m looking forward to  the upgrade, but I did kind of like the version in place now.  Oh well.  Hey XBox, just keep allowing me to play Ninja Gaiden 2, and we’re good.  The upgrade’s free (required) and will be available in the Fall season of this year.  It’s hard not to accuse Microsoft of borrowing from any number of their rivals, but enough technology is borrowed and stolen in the video game industry that it’s only fair to share sometimes.  However, these rivals should fear the possibility of Microsoft doing it better…

On top of this, Microsoft will offer to their Gold membership the ability to stream Netflix movies straight onto their XBox at no additional cost.  Standard Def for now.  As Netflix grows to HD, so will this service. Of course, these Gold members will also need a Netflix subscription.  To me, this is pure genius.  I’ve honestly never considered a membership to one of those mail order rental companies until this announcement was made.  Good show, on both parts.  This will definitely stur things up a bit, and make the XBox way more worth buying for many customers.  This move goes in the direction of making the system a part of the DV-R family!  Well, maybe a distant cousin, but still!  Also, making streaming rentals a possibility is something of a ‘return fire’ in the direction of Sony after they won the HD format war…  Microsoft has rebuilt their defenses on the home entertainment end.  Let’s see how well they hold this time around.

Another jab at the Playstation 3 would be the 360’s future ability to have games fully install onto the hard drive.  Of course this will mean two things: more 120gb XBox 360 hard drives will be sold, and bigger games will be made.  Fantastic.  Now we’ll see for certain how well the 360 works under pressure.  If you know anything about computers, you understand that reading from a hard drive is quicker than reading from a disk (if not, you just been learned).  That means they can cram more into a game without worrying about load times and such junk.

I’m excited, are you?