X box life in contact. Game consoles Xbox One. Operating system interface

Stay connected with your friends and gaming community everywhere you go across Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs, tablets, and phones. See what your friends are playing, view your achievements, get notifications, send messages, share game clips, and much more. You can even party chat with gamers across Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs.

Play in more places

Enjoy the freedom to play your favorite games in more places than ever. Easily access your games, friends, and community across Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, tablet, and phone. Wherever you go, your games and achievements go with you. And when you stream your Xbox One games to your Windows 10 PC, you can continue to play with your friends and record your best game moments.

Build your gaming legacy

Earn Achievements and add to your Gamerscore across Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, tablet, and phone. Take screenshots and capture your best gaming moments with built-in Game DVR. Use the footage to create amazing videos, add commentary, and share them with your friends. You can also broadcast gameplay live from your Xbox One via Mixer for the world to see. Create your own identity as a gamer. Customize your Gamertag, create your own Xbox Avatar, and bring together everything that matters to you in your Gamer Profile.

XBox consoles are one of the most popular models of gaming devices. The stationary XBox One console is the latest development, characterized by excellent quality and wide possibilities that go beyond simple gaming duels.

The case and joystick are made in a laconic futuristic design, in white or black. Their configuration and design are characterized by minimalism and perfect ergonomics. The dynamism of the game is provided by an 8-core processor and 8 GB random access memory. At the same time, the device is produced in versions of 500 and 1024 GB of internal memory with the possibility of additionally connecting an external removable drive.

If desired, players can take screenshots and record a video of the gameplay with subsequent uploading to the Internet. Many free games and applications are available for device users.

Gaming consoles XBox One at a bargain price

You can buy any XBox One game console you like around the clock and seven days a week in the Eldorado online store. We offer a high-quality catalog of media devices with detailed technical specifications and many discount and bonus programs. Any purchase can be picked up by self-delivery or received with delivery to the specified address.

It's no secret and no news to anyone that the electronic entertainment market is growing primarily due to consoles - game consoles, the main purpose of which is the electronic entertainment itself. Over the past five years, growth in PC game sales has virtually stagnated, and most of the recent market breakthroughs have been driven by the success of a variety of specialized gaming systems, from "big" home "console" to handheld gaming computers.

Fixed, standardized gaming platforms are more capable of surviving in competition with universal ones - they are lower in cost, easier to sell, easier to make games for them, easier to use. Finally, their development is easier to control, direct in the right direction, making major changes to them does not require many years of coordination of the points of view and positions of dozens of clumsy transnational corporations.

Not surprisingly, the market for specialized gaming devices is constantly becoming an object of close attention of companies that have achieved success in any area and are trying to diversify their activities, find new profitable areas and market niches. In the last decade of the last century, the Japanese corporation Sony, which released the PlayStation game console, became such a company. And at the beginning of the 21st century, the ubiquitous Microsoft corporation decided to try its hand at this market.

The birth of the Xbox

Entering the console market, Microsoft followed its usual path: abundant financial injections, careful copying of the main characteristics of competitors' successful products, reliance on recognized technology leaders in the industry ... The Xbox project started, like most other projects of the corporation, and therefore no one especially I was not surprised when it became known that the project brings continuous losses to the company. Microsoft has impressive reserves that allow it to carry out, in fact, dumping campaigns again and again - to penetrate the market by selling (or even distributing) its product at reduced prices. And here the quality of the product itself is not even so important - even if they are, as a rule, comparable or superior to the quality of competing products.

Since its launch in the fall of 2001, the Xbox has brought its owner a tangible profit only once - on the pre-holiday December 2004, when the number of consoles sold and the release of the sequel to the main headliner of the platform, the shooter Halo, turned into a kind of new year gift. Pretty soon everything was back to normal, and the Xbox again became a loss-making product for Microsoft.

Here, however, it is necessary to remember what we talked about a little higher: Microsoft never skimps on financial injections into a new market for itself. And so it is very likely that Microsoft did not count on making a profit from the first version of the Xbox - it was supposed to "seize a foothold", serve as a high-profile, but unprofitable advertising campaign for itself.

This is partly true, apparently, but a number of indirect signs (Microsoft's unwillingness to lower the price for the sake of sales growth, litigation with component suppliers, as well as some characteristics of the successor console, the Xbox 360) suggests that even Microsoft did not count on such a loss project.

Therefore, when creating the second version of the Xbox, the corporation completely changed the list of companies that supply components, the relationship with them, and significantly revised the background philosophy of the platform.

The first and most obvious casualty of the new marketing philosophy was the name, to avoid the unpleasant numerical Xbox comparisons 2 with the main competitor in the face of the PlayStation 3, they decided to call the second version of the Xbox Xbox 360, which, according to the company's marketers, should mean something like "the circle is solid Xbox."

The new console was first presented to the public on the eve of the E3 exhibition in May 2005. Microsoft has chosen a very aggressive pace of promoting the second version of the Xbox to the market: after the announcement in May, an active campaign followed in the summer and the start of sales new console simultaneously in three "main" regions (North America, Europe and Japan) in autumn, in November 2005. (The reader can find out more in Xbox 360.) Such an active introduction to the market new version The Xbox was largely driven by Microsoft's desire to overtake its competitors and be the first to introduce a new generation of gaming console.

And, yes, the appearance on the shelves of the Xbox 360 led to the death of the first Xbox - both in terms of sales of the console itself, and in terms of developing any new games for it.

Comparison of characteristics of Xbox and Xbox 360

First, let's see how the basic specifications Xbox and Xbox 360:

We have already mentioned that when creating the Xbox 360, Microsoft decisively cut off relations with the two main technology partners involved in the development of the first Xbox - Intel and NVIDIA. And, apparently, in both cases, such a gap was the result of Microsoft's consistent movement to reduce the unprofitability of the entire Xbox project as a whole.

CPU

Intel processors are quite expensive, because they carry a lot of functionality that is redundant for a game console - functionality designed to simplify the work of programmers and speed up the execution of many versions of x86 code created over the two decades of the existence of this architecture. And since the console will mainly run programs created specifically for this console, there was little point in “dragging along” the entire heritage of the x86 architecture, and Microsoft turned to IBM with a proposal to create a processor specially “sharpened” for a game console.

Of course, IBM did not create a processor from scratch, and instead embodied in silicon a new variation of the PowerPC architecture, which has long been familiar to everyone (until recently, processors of this architecture were used in Apple computers). This variation differed from the previous "incarnations" of the architecture in its simplicity, thanks to which it was possible to "squeeze" as many as three processor cores into a rather modest number of transistors (the complexity of the crystal of the three-core Xbox 360 CPU is comparable to the complexity of the crystal of a single-core Pentium 4 on the Prescott-2M core) and significantly increase their clock frequency.

The victims of simplification fell, in particular, blocks that perform dynamic optimization of code execution - it became more difficult to program for the Xbox 360 processor, but with the right approach, this processor should give impressive performance at its relatively low cost. Which, as we said, Microsoft needed.

However, when comparing the Xbox 360 processor with modern x86 processors, it should be remembered that the latter, despite their relatively lower peak performance, more often approach it than the Xbox 360 processor. Thus, we can assume that this code, being compiled for modern dual-core x86 CPUs ( Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD Athlon 64 X2) will generally show no less performance than a triple-core Xbox 360 CPU.

video system

With the Xbox 360 video system, the situation is more complicated: it is not entirely clear how much the decision to abandon NVIDIA services was dictated by economic and technological expediency, and how much - behind-the-scenes political battles. The fact is that, on the one hand, at the time of the beginning of the development of the Xbox 360, NVIDIA was in a rather unpleasant technological state for itself - the NV3x architecture could hardly withstand the onslaught from the competing ATI R3x0 architecture. On the other hand, today's confrontation between 3D technologies from ATI and NVIDIA takes place, rather, with the superiority of the latter's video chips, and it's hard to judge how technologically the Xbox 360 would lose if it again had a video chip from the Californian company.

Economically, the choice between NVIDIA and ATI also seems rather vague: both companies develop video chips in North America, i.e., R&D costs are comparable; both companies then place orders for the production of video chips at external independent semiconductor factories (TSMC, UMC, NEC, etc.), i.e. production costs are also comparable; both companies are at the same stage in the development of 3D technologies, and neither of them is significantly ahead of the other in this.

That is why we tend to the version of the "political" choice in favor of ATI. The fact is that at one time Microsoft and NVIDIA sued each other over the cost of components supplied by NVIDIA for the Xbox console. The trial was won by NVIDIA, which doomed Microsoft to further unprofitability of the Xbox project as a whole. It is quite natural that Microsoft did not want to continue cooperation with NVIDIA after this incident. Moreover, the scheme of working with development companies has changed, and Microsoft no longer buys the components themselves, it buys technologies created by partners that allow it to independently order the production of components at independent semiconductor factories. ATI (more precisely, now AMD) agreed to a similar scheme of work, and therefore its video chip found its way into the Xbox 360.

As for the ATI Xenos (or C1) video chip itself, it is the first representative of new unified shader architectures. In such architectures, the same pipelines process vertices and pixels.

According to unofficial information we have, this video chip was originally developed for computer video cards, but the complexity of creating a unified architecture, as well as its excessive flexibility in the era of API DirectX 9, led to the fact that the chip was first released as part of a console from Microsoft. The appearance of computer video cards based on the improved successor of Xenos - the R600 video chip with DX10 support - is expected in the first quarter of 2007.

One of the unique features of Xenos (which, by the way, is unlikely to be inherited by its computer descendants) is its dual-core nature: the ROP block that works with the frame buffer (writing values, calculating anti-aliasing) is placed on a separate chip, which also contains 10 MB of memory, connected to the ROP by a wide internal bus. Due to the use of a special algorithm for rendering a frame in parts (tiles), the Xenos chip is able to provide almost free anti-aliasing, which does not load the bandwidth of the system memory bus, since it is entirely carried out inside the auxiliary "smart" memory chip.

According to the estimated performance characteristics (it is, of course, not possible to conduct normal testing), the Xenos video chip is somewhere at the level of computer video cards built on NVIDIA G70 and G71 video chips (GeForce 7800 and 7900) and ATI R520 and R580 (Radeon X1800 and X1900) . Approximately comparable and functionality all these video chips.

HDD

Another comparative surprise was the elimination of the hard drive that is standard in the console - comparative, because from the point of view of reducing the cost of the set-top box, it was the elimination of the hard drive that acted as one of the main options. The main problem with eliminating the HDD from the second version of the Xbox was the loss of the ability to provide backward compatibility with Xbox games - most of them were designed with the ability to access the hard drive available in each console at any time.

Microsoft found a way out of this situation by providing backward compatibility with the Xbox only if the Xbox 360 had a hard drive, and simultaneously introducing two versions of the console - cheaper and more expensive - differing, in fact, in the absence and presence of a hard drive. At the same time, owners of a cheap version of the Xbox 360 (the so-called Core System) can later purchase a hard drive separately, after which their console will also be able to provide backward compatibility with some Xbox games (the list of these games is constantly growing).

In general, we note that by abandoning most of the architectural solutions used in the Xbox, Microsoft doomed itself to constant problems with backward compatibility. Full backwards compatibility could not be in principle, because the Xbox 360 CPU is simply not capable of executing x86 code, and the executable files of Xbox games require recompilation. No less problems - though more legal than technical - arose when it was necessary to launch games created for the NV2A on an ATI video chip. But, apparently, Microsoft felt that reducing the cost of the console was more important than potential negative reviews for incomplete backward compatibility.

In using software emulation of the old platform, however, there are some advantages that are not available for the “hardware” backward compatibility, implemented, for example, in Sony PS2 and PS3. So, in particular, most of the Xbox games that can be run on the Xbox 360 work in HDTV resolution (1280x720) and with anti-aliasing, which is a direct consequence of the software emulation of the Xbox video chip on a much more powerful Xenos video chip.

Main storage medium

Another controversial aspect of the Xbox 360 is the use of the already frankly outdated dual-layer DVD-ROM with a maximum capacity of 8.5 GB as the main storage medium. It is likely that after some time games for the Xbox 360 will be released on two or more DVDs, which clearly does not add any pluses to the console in the eyes of ordinary consumers (the need to change the disc in the middle of the game is difficult to write down as the pluses of the first new generation console). Moreover, one such game has already been released! So far, however, only in Japan - JRPG Blue Dragon occupies as many as 3 (!) DVD9 discs.

However, Microsoft's decision here was due to its own desire to overtake competitors in time to market: in November 2005 there were simply no alternatives to DVD, and the company had to take a potentially erroneous step in order to achieve its main goal - to appear in stores much earlier than alternative gaming platforms. the same generation.

Main platform innovations

But the main innovations of the Xbox 360 lie not so much in its hardware stuffing (it is still hidden from the eyes of the average user, who, by and large, does not care what architecture the processor is in the set-top box he bought, as long as it works normally and does not break), how much in the new platform philosophy.

New design

The first thing that catches your eye, of course, is the new design: instead of the “inflated” black box with lettuce inserts, there is a “concave” snow-white matte case with silver and gray elements. The design of the Xbox 360 is influenced by the success of Apple's device design. Less gloomy man-made devices; more lively, light, organic forms, pleasing to the eye and to the touch.

In addition to its "neutrality" to wildlife, the design of the Xbox 360 is very well thought out and functional: all buttons and connectors are in place; the possibility of both horizontal and vertical installation of the console is provided; on the back and side walls there are mounts for some separately sold accessories (hard drive, Wi-Fi adapter).

Only the DVD-ROM drive causes negative reviews - a retractable tray mechanism, familiar to everyone from computer optical drives, is not the best suited for a game console. More successful here is the slot-in mechanism with a shutter that protects the inside of the drive from dirt and dust (a similar mechanism can be seen, for example, in the Nintendo Wii). However, this is not the worst of the options - the top-opening drive used in the Sony PStwo is even less suitable for use in standard racks and cabinets for consumer electronics.

New gamepads

Another innovation that becomes apparent a few seconds after connecting the console to power, screen and speakers are new gamepads. Microsoft hasn't been afraid to redesign the Xbox 360 controllers, ditching the bulky, chubby, angular predecessors in favor of a taut, matte white that fits comfortably in the hand of followers. At the same time, followers were provided with the possibility of wireless communication with the console, the benefits of which become more than obvious within an hour after the launch of the first game.

Note, however, that wireless controllers are another option that differentiates the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 from the Xbox 360 Core System. The cheap Core System uses conventional wired gamepads plugged into USB ports on the console. But then again, no one and nothing prevents the owner of a cheap version of the Xbox 360 from buying wireless controllers later.

New Xbox Live!

Xbox 360's latest obvious innovation is a redesigned service Xbox Live! After the release of the Xbox 360, Live! was divided into two components - Silver and Gold. The first of them is free and available via the Internet to every owner of the Xbox 360. It allows you to communicate with other players ( text messages or by voice), download updates and add-ons for operating system console and games running on it, download demos, videos and other promotional materials. This version also allows you to make electronic purchases of small games (the so-called Xbox Live! Arcade), additions to your "big" games, and in general everything that can be sent via the Internet (in particular, a video file store was launched in the fall of 2006; and in the future, an analogue of Apple iTunes is possible).

The second part, Live! Gold, is paid (subscription for a year) and allows you to play multiplayer games over the Internet in addition to the above features.

Xbox Live! in this moment is, perhaps, a unique entertainment service of this scale and scope. As of this writing, Xbox Live! significantly surpassed in its stability and ease of use the similar PlayStation Network service launched by Sony along with its new PlayStation 3 console. Time will tell what will happen next, but the consumer usually wins from competition ;-)

Accessories for Xbox 360

We decided to devote a separate chapter of our review to accessories that Microsoft offers to all owners of the Xbox 360. However, we will not focus on things that are insignificant in our opinion, like interchangeable front panels of the console itself, and we will talk about what can be really useful for owners of the Xbox 360 (For a complete list of all accessories, see Xbox 360.)

The first line of purchase are accessories that distinguish the more expensive version of the Xbox 360 from the Xbox 360 Core System: wireless gamepads, a hard drive and cables for connecting to an image display device.

Wireless gamepads we have described in detail above. Here we only note that these gamepads, of course, require their own power supply, which is available in two versions: AA standard batteries (batteries or accumulators) and Microsoft branded batteries. If everything is more or less clear with the former, then branded batteries have a number of features that should be discussed separately.

Firstly, you can charge the branded battery directly during the game by connecting the gamepad with a special cord (Play "n" Charge Kit) to the USB connector on the console. Ordinary "fingers" will not provide you with such an opportunity, but we assume that the price of 4 AA batteries will be lower than the price of one branded battery and the Play "n" Charge Kit for it. We also assume that ordinary AA batteries will be fine for someone.

Secondly, you can charge branded batteries using the proprietary Quick Charge Kit, which allows you to quickly charge two batteries at the same time, but to recharge them you need to remove them from the gamepads and, as a result, it is impossible to play.

HDD for the Xbox 360 is a regular 2.5" hard drive with a SATA interface (the same drives are used in laptops) with a capacity of 20 GB, which is located in a beautiful metal-plastic case and is connected to the Xbox 360 using a special converter. Despite the fact that the drive itself is quite is standard, as far as we know, it has not been possible to replace it with a larger HDD at the moment.Microsoft itself does not yet offer hard drives with a capacity other than 20 GB for the Xbox 360.

The reader probably understands that 20 GB in our time is quite small (especially considering that about 6 GB of hard disk space takes away system files, and the owner of the Xbox 360 has no more than 14 GB of disk space available). Therefore, owners of the Xbox 360 may well be faced with a situation of lack of space on the HDD and the need to delete something from it in order to download from Live! new files. Unfortunately, Microsoft did not even provide for the Xbox 360 the ability to transfer files from the Xbox 360 HDD to other network media - for example, to the hard drives of a PC connected to the same local network.

Concerning video cables, then the Xbox 360 is able to connect to display devices through:

• composite SDTV cable (regular RCA bells, the cable is included with the Xbox 360 Core System);
• component HDTV cable (RGB or Y "PbPr, the cable is included with the more expensive version of the Xbox 360);
• S-Video cable;
• VGA cables;
• all possible local geographic variants of connectors for component connection (SCART, D-Terminal).

Note that the Xbox 360 does not currently support digital DVI/HDMI connections and it is unknown if it will continue to do so.

Also of the accessories available to owners of the Xbox 360, it should be noted:

HD DVD Player, which plugs into the console's USB port and allows you to play HD DVD video discs. Its main advantage is the price, which is at least half that of full-fledged HD DVD players.

Memory cards for 64 MB. Needed if you don't have money for HDD for Xbox 360; useless if you already have an HDD.

WiFi adapter to connect to 802.11g Wi-Fi networks. Installed on the back of the console, above the LAN and USB connectors, connects to USB. Pretty useful thing if you don't want to litter the room with extra wires. But we will tell about some features of his work below.

Headset and wireless headset for in-game and out-of-game voice communication via Xbox Live! The thing is absolutely indispensable for multiplayer cooperative games. A regular headset is connected to the connector on the gamepad. The wireless one does not connect anywhere - and this, in fact, is its only difference from a wired headset connected to a wireless gamepad.

Universal remote control, with which you can control not only the playback of movies on the Xbox 360, but also, for example, a computer running Windows XP MCE. The usefulness of this remote control is rather doubtful with a wireless gamepad, but white people may have a different opinion ;-)

The last accessory worth mentioning is video camera, which connects to the Xbox 360 USB connector. The camcorder allows you to take photos that can then be used in Xbox 360 games. Also in the Live! Arcade has several games available using this camcorder in the style of the well-known Eye-Toy for the Sony PS2.

But enough theory, let's move on to a practical study of the new gaming platform.

Xbox 360 experience

So, in our hands is an expensive European version of the Xbox 360 - with a hard drive, wireless gamepads and a silver DVD tray cover.

In addition to the console itself, we purchased:

• the second wireless gamepad (for games together);
• Play "n" Charge Kit (battery for the gamepad and cord for recharging it right during the game from the USB port on the console);
• separate battery for the second gamepad;
• VGA cable for connection to the DSUB connector on the monitor;
• Wi-Fi adapter for wireless connection to your home network and the Internet.

The console comes in a relatively small but almost cubic box with a convenient plastic handle - the handle allows you to carry the box without much difficulty and thinking about what bag this box can fit into.

Inside the box was the expected set of standard delivery of the PAL-version of the Xbox 360:

• the console itself with a hard drive installed;
• one wireless gamepad with two AA batteries for it;
• wired headset (earphone and microphone);
• component HDTV cable and SCART adapter;
• Ethernet cable for connecting to a local network;
• power supply with two cables (to the mains and to the console).

Installing and connecting the console

Connecting the console does not cause any particular difficulties: all cables and adapters can only be plugged into the correct connectors, each of which is marked with a graphic icon that does not require knowledge of any language at all.

In our case, the gamepad, after installing the battery in it and turning it on, immediately found the included Xbox 360, but if this did not happen, then it would be necessary to press the round button for searching for gamepads on the front panel of the console (there are only two of them, one of which is large, with icon "on"), and then press the same button on the controller itself (top, between the left and right shifts). We had to do a similar procedure to connect a second gamepad to the console.

Note that up to 4 wireless gamepads can be connected to one Xbox 360, and the corresponding indication is available both on the front side of the console itself (a glowing green circle around the console power button) and on the gamepads (a glowing green circle around, um, the gamepad power button) . In the case of connecting several gamepads, several sectors of the circle (a quarter, half, three quarters or the whole circle) light up on the console, and on the gamepads, the sector next to the number under which this gamepad is registered in the console.

The connection of the console to the audio system deserves special mention. You have two options: either connect to the stereo input of an amplifier or speakers (standard RCA "bells"); or connect with an optical cable to a Dolby Digital 5.1 digital stream receiver-decoder. In the latter case, the Xbox 360 provides 5.1-channel audio for both DVD movies and games. Note that a TOSLINK cable for connecting to the receiver must be purchased separately (but, as a rule, it comes with VGA or other HDTV cables, because the optical port for connecting it is not on the Xbox 360 itself, but on these very cables).

After physically connecting and turning on the set-top box, you will be taken to the console's initial setup wizard, which will guide you through the basic settings - choosing the interface language, creating your profile, choosing the screen resolution, audio signal type, etc. The process is very clear and does not cause any particular difficulties.

Unless you have to suffer later with the choice of the optimal resolution for your screen - depending on how and to which screen the console is connected, different options provide different quality. For example, when connecting an Xbox 360 via a component cable to a widescreen HDTV monitor with a ViewSonic SDTV tuner with a native 1280x720 matrix resolution, we unexpectedly found that setting the Xbox 360 to 1080i resolution eliminated some of the image scaling artifacts observed in Saints Row in Saints Row. when setting the "native" resolution matrix to 720p.

Operating system interface

At this stage, the owner of the Xbox 360 is already quite familiar with the interface of the console's operating system. The interface is quite simple and it's not hard to navigate at all.

In the horizontal axis of the interface (left-right) you have a choice of four main pages (each one has its own background color for easy identification):

• xbox live
• games
• media
• system

The vertical axis of the interface (up and down) allows you to select options and sub-items within the main page you have chosen.

The xbox live page is where you sign in to Xbox Live! - Here you can chat with friends, download demos and videos, buy add-ons for your existing games and the games themselves on Xbox Live! Arcade.

The games page contains options related to the games you have - here you can see your achievements, what games you play most often, launch a game downloaded from Xbox Live! Arcade or demo version of the "big" game.

On the media page, you can start viewing videos or photos or a music player, and the source can be either a DVD disc or a portable media device connected to the USB port of the console, or the hard drive of the console or the hard drive of a computer connected to that the same local network as the console itself (the computer must be running Windows XP MCE, Windows XP with Windows Media Connect, or Windows Vista). From the same page you can get to the Xbox Live! A marketplace that sells a variety of video files.

The system page contains console settings. Most of them do not require frequent changes, so you will rarely look at this page.

It is worth noting that the interface and the location of items on the main pages, not to mention the subsections of these pages, have slightly changed several times over the year since the Xbox 360 went on sale - Microsoft is constantly improving the console's operating system, and its updates also affect the interface .

Ergonomics of gamepads

After getting acquainted with the interface and the first hours spent studying the games we bought, the owner of the console pays attention to the ergonomics of the new gamepads.

The standard Xbox 360 wireless controller is very comfortable in the hands (its sharpened, rounded shapes affect), the fingers do not have to be folded with the letter “zyu” to reach the button that is needed at that moment.

Mini joysticks have round guides and move smoothly in them with a clear fixation in the center of their holders. Still somewhat farfetched, but already traditional for Xbox consoles, it looks like moving the left ministick to the top of the gamepad and installing a D-pad in its “traditional” place, but they say that such an arrangement of ministicks is better suited for games of certain genres.

Unlike the PlayStation 3 gamepads, the new Xbox 360 gamepads retained the Force Feedback function, or, more simply, vibration motors. Judging by our feelings compared to the gamepads of other consoles (Sony PS2, Nintendo Wii), as well as computer gamepads (Logitech RumblePad 2), Xbox 360 wireless gamepads vibrate quite strongly - hands shake noticeably, bodybuilders will be happy ;-)

But the digital eight-way d-pad is disappointing - unlike the four directional buttons that are probably familiar to many readers on the Sony console gamepads, the d-pad on the Xbox 360 gamepad is implemented as one large plastic circle-on-a-leg, pressing on the edges of which you press on hidden under it contact buttons around.

The advantage of such an implementation is that you do not need to press two buttons at once if you need to get diagonal movement. The downside is that clicking on the edges of the circle is far from being as obvious as clicking on regular buttons. The circle, when you click on its edge, tilts and shifts relative to the vertical axis, which somewhat confuses the presser - we press down, and for some reason the circle moves to the side. In this case, the circle often hits its edge on the annular base of the cross, suddenly stopping and bringing to life not very pleasant sounds. In sum, all this leads to the fact that pressing the cross is not tactilely felt - whether the contact button under the circle was pressed or not can only be determined by what is happening on the screen, which is far from always convenient.

But the Xbox 360 wireless controllers also have one significant and unique plus at the time the console appeared on sale: they allow you to turn the console on and off, wherever the console itself is located - there are advantages of radio contact and a special communication protocol between the gamepad and the console.

True, if the gamepad is not touched for some time, then it turns off to save battery power, and in order to reconnect it to the console, you have to press the “X” button in the middle, initiating a relatively long (5-10 seconds) process of searching for your base station by the gamepad . And when this process has to be observed ten times a day (say, you went out to have lunch, then drink coffee and finally just smoke, and the gamepad turned off every time), then in the end it already starts to annoy.

But in general, the new Xbox 360 gamepads should be recognized as practically a reference in their ergonomics and significantly superior in this indicator to their predecessors from the previous generation of Xbox. And wired Xbox 360 gamepads differ from their wireless counterparts only in the absence of a battery compartment “under the belly”, as a result, a little less weight and, of course, the presence of a long wire.

Noise and heat dissipation

Finally, the last characteristic that is of interest to buyers is the noise of the console and the heat dissipation that is always wandering somewhere near the noise. And, unfortunately, there is nothing special to brag about in this area of ​​​​the Xbox 360: the console heats up and makes noise, and it makes a very unpleasant “walking” ringing of a spinning small fan (or rather, two) on rolling bearings.

This ringing is especially annoying, firstly, against the background of the practically absent jet of "exhaust" of hot air. We're willing to forgive the noise if it's caused by efficient cooling fans, but in the case of the Xbox 360, the noise is high and the console's airflow is somehow modest. Secondly, the noise emitted by the Xbox 360 seems excessive against the background of a nearby computer case with more than ten low-speed fans, which in total provide less noise under complex system loads. modern games than two Xbox 360 fans when the console is completely idle...

Of course, if a DVD disc is in the console's drive, then the noise of the fans immediately fades into the background, muffled by the noise of the disc spinning in the drive, which in turn is successfully covered by the soundtrack of the game or movie. But the problem is that Xbox Live! implies that the console will be turned on quite often when no one is playing on it - downloading multi-megabyte demos, video files and other add-ons is not fast, and the ideal night time for this requires silence, which the Xbox 360 does not seem to provide capable.

Other operating features

Among other surprises revealed during the operation of the Xbox 360, one can note some features in connecting the console to a computer monitor with a screen aspect ratio of 4:3 and some unpleasant surprises in the operation of the proprietary Wi-Fi adapter.

With a screen connection, the situation is as follows: (literally) all Xbox 360 games are designed to work on a wide screen with an aspect ratio of 16:9 (standard HDTV resolutions are 1280x720 and 1920x1080). When connecting the console to a VGA connector (note that this is not only true for computer monitors, since many HDTVs have a VGA connector for connecting projectors and computers), you can specify the resolution in which the console will output the signal. These resolutions include both traditional "computer" resolutions (eg 1280x1024) and "widescreen" HDTV resolutions. Also, in the console settings, the aspect ratio is set - 4:3 or 16:9, which accordingly affects the pixel format (in the picture with an aspect ratio of 16:9 on a 4:3 screen, the interface elements look elongated vertically).

The problem is that not all games can adequately perceive these settings. Some games (such as Perfect Dark Zero) work correctly at 1280x1024 with a 4:3 aspect ratio. But there are games (like Project Gotham Racing 3) that ignore the settings specified in the console itself and set the wrong pixel format, resulting in a vertically stretched look. Unfortunately, this annoying feature can be corrected only by adjusting the monitor settings - that is, by squeezing the image vertically using the monitor, if it allows it.

This feature should be remembered by those who plan to connect the Xbox 360 to a screen with an aspect ratio of 4:3.

The second nuisance we have identified concerns the operation of the "proprietary" adapter for connecting to Wi-Fi networks. The fact is that when you connect to the Internet through this adapter, for some reason we do not understand, the connection with Xbox Live is constantly broken! - the connection itself is in order, the Internet works continuously (on a computer connected to the same network, the download is not interrupted during such disconnections), it is the connection to Xbox Live that is lost! Moreover, this is observed only when connected via Wi-Fi, when connected with the usual network cable Directly to the router, the connection keeps for many days.

It is difficult to say what caused this behavior during a Wi-Fi connection - the features of the Xbox 360 software, the features of the Wi-Fi adapter, or problems in its work with our access point (Zyxel Prestige 662HW), but for those who plan to connect the Xbox 360 to the network using a proprietary Wi-Fi adapter, it will be useful to know about this problem. Especially since there are already alternative and less expensive options for connecting the Xbox 360 wirelessly to your home network.

At the same time, we want to express our “fi” to Microsoft programmers who did not provide for the Xbox 360 OS the option to automatically reconnect to Live! in case of loss. Perhaps they should pay attention to this point when developing the next console OS update.

conclusions

Microsoft's new gaming console has undoubtedly been very successful. The combination of specially designed hardware for the console and the right approach to marketing and positioning will undoubtedly allow the Xbox 360 to win a larger number of fans than the first Xbox managed to do.

A sufficiently powerful and, importantly, non-standard video chip will allow games for the Xbox 360 to stand out graphically from games for other platforms - and we're not talking so much about quality, but about the stylistics of X360 games' graphics. However, we will tell you more about this in reviews of the games themselves.

Advanced media features (DVD video playback, photo display, music playback, interaction with personal computers and portable media devices such as iPod) will surely appeal to those who like to use game consoles for other than their intended purpose.

At the same time, the early entry of the Xbox 360 into the market, although it gave Microsoft almost a year's head start, had a negative impact on its functionality. It's not yet fully understood how much Microsoft's attempts to augment the console's functionality with external devices (particularly the HD DVD drive) will help it compete against young and innovative rivals (particularly the PlayStation 3 and Wii).

However, at the moment, the Microsoft Xbox 360 is perhaps the best console of the new generation - in a year it managed to acquire a serious gaming library, and the projects already announced for it will be of interest to the vast majority of gamers in the future. What will the recently released Nintendo Wii and Sony PlayStation be able to oppose to the Xbox 360? We will talk about this another time.

pros

• First new generation HDTV console on the market
• Several already released very good exclusive games (Gears of War, Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Saints Row, Dead Rising, Project Gotham Racing 3, Dead or Alive 4)
• Extremely useful, convenient and public service Xbox Live! Silver - Global player profiles, planet-wide achievement lists, voice chat (plus a hell of a lot of fun Xbox Live! Arcade minigames)
• Thoroughly thought out and unified for all games, the Xbox Live service! Gold is a universal environment for multiplayer games and everything for players to communicate with each other
• Ergonomically reference gamepads
• Very good console design
• Simple and user-friendly operating system interface
• Advanced media capabilities (showing video, audio, photos; network phone; interaction with PC and mobile devices)
• A large number of various accessories that significantly increase the capabilities of the console
• Two versions of the console, differing in price and functionality

Minuses

• Lack of any major innovations other than Xbox Live! - most of the changes compared to the first Xbox are purely quantitative
• Relatively few exclusive games - most Xbox 360 games are also released on other platforms (particularly Windows PC)
• Extremely stripped-down functionality of the cheap version of the console - no backwards compatibility, hard drive and wireless controllers
• High console noise
• High percentage of breakdowns in the first year of sales of the console