This blog post references my article 'Got game? Living-room consoles grapple for consumers eyeballs, wallets' in the December 16, 2005 issue of EDN.

After spending three hours in early November with Microsoft and partners’ Xbox 360 development teams. I was impressed with what the companies have accomplished in such a short amount of time. I’m also optimistic about Xbox 360’s potential for success both in the near term, with the console’s first wave of 18 launch titles, and in the long term.

I talked with Earnest Yuen and Katy Gentes, the developer representatives of Kameo and Project Gotham Racing 3, respectively. The amount of attention the development teams paid to detail in both titles is stunning, as is the resultant immersive quality. The primary automobile in Project Gotham Racing 3 comprises roughly 80,000 polygons, half of them generating the car’s interior, which received little attention in earlier Xbox versions of the game. One example of this immersive quality is that the rendering of the outside perspectives from the rear- and side-view mirrors is accurate; the game updates them frame-by-frame as the car speeds around the track.

One of the developers owns a Dodge Viper and spent a day on an abandoned airstrip near Microsoft’s campus, where he went through three sets of tires, to generate the game’s realistic sounds recorded by an array of microphones attached to the car. Development teams also visited Las Vegas, London, New York, and Tokyo, along with the Nürburgring track, and shot “tens of thousands of photographs and hundreds of hours of video,” which they later converted to meticulous 3-D renderings. You can create your own routes, thereby tapping into areas of each city that the standard courses don’t access. And the Gotham TV feature allows online onlookers to intimately observe races in progress and queue up for subsequent spins around the track.

Gentes and Yuen also admitted that multi-core and multi-threading support, necessary to make optimum use of the available processing resources, are concepts that “took some time for the developers to wrap their heads around.” As an example, Yuen showed me one of the last levels developed for Kameo, after the coders had cultivated their expertise on the console’s capabilities and limitations, potential pit-falls, and their circumventions. This level revealed obvious improvements in detail, including the use of hundreds of independently moving and interacting particles, for example, and gave a glimpse into the inevitable enhancements that second-wave and later titles will add. Somewhat surprisingly, though, neither Gentes nor Yuen felt that the transition from PowerPC 970FX-based G5 PowerMac development platforms to the final PPE (PowerPC-processing-element)-based consoles was particularly challenging.

I also spent some time observing two Dead or Alive 4 players, and I attended a hands-on demonstration of the Xbox 360 and closely coupled next-generation Xbox Live user interfaces. The Xbox 360 I operated wasn’t yet able to play the Yahoo Music Unlimited subscription content I have stored on my iRiver H10 portable audio player, but the console correctly identified the player, and Microsoft plans subscription DRM support. I also confirmed that the Xbox 360 could access MP3 files stored on an Apple iPod nano. Microsoft is delivering AAC audio codec support through an Xbox Live-accessible console firmware update. This support is sufficient to play content that users rip from CDs in iTunes, although Apple has not yet granted Microsoft a FairPlay DRM license that would enable playback of iTunescontent.

I've got an Xbox 360 'premium' ($399) console in-hand, along with a suite of games, and I've also purchased a second wireless controller, headset and two Play & Charge kits. Christmas, you can see, came early to the Dipert household! However, I've been so swamped these past few weeks that I haven't even fired the gear up yet, and the upcoming week doesn't look any better. Worst case, I plan to bring everything back to the Midwest for the holidays; I'm sure my nephews will be happy to join my review team. In addition to navigating my way through games, I’ll extensively test the Xbox 360’s aptitude for accessing and controlling a variety of audio and still-image material on other LAN clients over UPnP, and to stream multimedia data (including video) from a Windows Media Center Edition PC. Keep an eye on the Brian’s Brain blog for follow-up reports.