CONSOLE NEWS: XBOX 360 News

[TechZ]

New Xbox Live Bundles Announced

The package, which retails for US$69.99, includes a 12-month Xbox Live subscription, an Xbox Live Communicator Headset, a full version of Project Gotham Racing 2, and casual games from Xbox Live Arcade. In addition to the 12-month option, a new three-month Xbox Live Starter Kit will be available this summer for US$39.99.


Xbox 360 pictured, does a million polygons

ATI did its own Rubi demo and was rendering that demo on 720P resolution. The Rubi model was rendered with 70,000 polygons while some of its elements had as many as 120,000 polygons per character. The most demanding scene had the dreamlike number of one million polygons per scene.

[TechZ]

XBox 360 Pricing Speculation -
Gamedaily has posted an interview with an analyst who believes the XBox 360 will launch with two SKUs. The first SKU will retail for $299, and will be hard drive free (or a smaller hard drive), the second SKU will retail for $349/$399 and will come with "everything a gamer needs anyway."

Xbox 360 games cheaper than expected? -
Amazon.co.uk has begun listing Xbox 360 games for pre order with the prices at either £29.99 or £32.99. So far the only games listed are Call of Duty 2 - £29.99, Kameo: Elements of Power - £29.99, Perfect Dark Zero - £32.99, Quake 4 - £29.99, Tony Hawk's American Wasteland - £29.99 and GUN - £29.99.

[TechZ]

North American retailer Electronics Boutique, which expects Microsoft to ship the Xbox 360 as early as November 2, 2005 for an MSRP of $299.99, has comprised a complete, albeit questionable, list of Xbox 360 games for the console launch, IGN learned today from several EB outlets. The list IGN acquired from EB retailers today, features 21 launch titles, including three first-party games from Microsoft Game Studios -- Perfect Dark LE (i.e. Limited Edition), Kameo: Elements of Power, and Project Gotham Racing 3, approximate pricing, and sku numbers for every game.

EB's own data includes a $59.99 price for every Xbox 360 game, except one, Kameo, which listed at $49.99. The retailer told IGN that software prices weren't fixed yet, as Microsoft, third-party publishers, and presumably North American retailers agree on a firm prices. EB even has Halo 3 listed as shipping July 1, 2006, presumably the same day as Sony's PlayStation 3.

The full list of expected launch titles:
Amped 3 (2K Games)
Call of Duty 2 (Activision)
Condemned (Sega)
Dead Or Alive 4 (Tecmo)
Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Bethesda)
Final Fantasy XI (Microsoft)
Full Auto (Sega)
Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter
Gun (Activision)
Kameo: Elements of Power (Microsoft)
Madden NFL 06 (EA)
NBA 2K6 (2K Games)
NHL 2K6 (2K Games)
The Outfit (THQ)
Perfect Dark LE (Microsoft)
Project Gotham Racing 3 (Microsoft)
Quake 4 (Activision)
Ridge Racer 6 (Namco)
Saints Row (THQ)
Tony Hawk's American Wasteland (Activision)
Top Spin 2 (2K Games)

In related news, the official Xbox 360 site has been updated with a great new video montage featuring footage from the upcoming Xbox 360 games.

[TechZ]

Burning Down the Xbox 360

Dean Takahashi, of the Mercury News, had the chance to visit the product evaluation and reliability labs for the Xbox 360 at Microsoft's Mountain View, CA, campus: " A guy named Rich Lee showed menditions. There is room for 120 Xbox 360s on the racks in this room, which can be heated or cooled as needed. I step in and feel the warm air blast me. The Xbox 360s stay in the pressure cooker for up to 72 hours at a time. There are about 1,100 components on the motherboard. A lot of stuff can go wrong a gigantic chamber where he can simulate all sorts of environmental co"


Xbox 360 may not always have a hard drive

Microsoft's forthcoming next-generation console may not always ship in a configuration with a hard drive, key Xbox executive J Allard has confirmed, with developers being warned not to rely on the component for their games. Speaking in the September issue of US magazine Game Informer, Allard said that the company isn't yet ready to announce details of possible multiple models of the Xbox 360, with the presence of a hard drive being touted as one potential difference between models.


Xbox 360 to ship at $299 without HDD, $399 for high-end version

The LA Times has broken news of Microsoft's pricing plans for the Xbox 360 console, revealing that the a basic version of the next-generation system will launch at $299, with a premium version shipping at $399. According to the paper, the $299 version of the console will not include a hard drive - with the extra $100 for the premium version buying a 20Gb drive as well as a wireless controller, headset, Ethernet cable and wireless television-style remote control.

[TechZ]

Microsoft Corp., which has used two companies to build its Xbox game console, said on Tuesday it is expanding that roster to three for its next-generation Xbox 360 due out later this year. The software giant said Toronto-based Celestica Inc. will join Xbox manufacturers Flextronics International Ltd. and Wistron Inc..

Microsoft said Xbox 360 remains on track for a launch this holiday season in North America, Europe and Japan. It is widely believed Microsoft will release the product in November.

"With three contract manufacturers on board, we're poised to have the flexibility and efficiencies we need to keep up with the consumer demand," said Todd Holmdahl, corporate vice president of the Xbox Product Group. Plants for each of the three companies building Microsoft's newest game console are located in the Pearl River Delta region in southern China.

News source: Reuters

[TechZ]

- This new picture also reveals, for the first time, the transistor count for each part of the two-die design. The parent die has a total of 232 million transistors while the daughter die has 100 million, making the whole package a 330+ million transistor design.

In comparison, an AMD Athlon 64 processor has approximately 205 M transistors while the PlayStation 3 Cell processor has ~234M and the RSX GPU designed by nVIDIA has some 300M.

[TechZ]

http://forums.windrivers.com/showthread.php?t=72342

[eva]

If I had my way id upgrade the hardware slightly about performance with calculations every 3 years on console, use the same fundamental tech, so the distance is not so great between PC and console and they dont drag each other down as much.

[Justinensuh]

vicaphit you hit the nail on the head. A real stat would be profit made off of each console.