Microsoft making a gaming console? Might have sounded like a joke to most people, but Microsoft’s Xbox has grown to be a tough competitor from Sony’s Playstation 2 and is already outselling Nintendo’s Gamecube.

When the Xbox launched at March 14th in Europe, it didn’t have the most amazing set of launch titles - there were a few brilliant games in there but the line-up in general wasn’t anything special. The launch titles included Blood Wake, Amped, Azurik, RalliSport Challenge, Halo, Munch’s Oddysee, Dead or Alive 3 and Project Gotham Racing. The only two titles that really shine above the rest and the many PS2 games out at the time were Halo and Project Gotham Racing. Halo with its fun fantasy FPS action and PGR with its original driving ideas and the introduction of Kudos to the Gaming World.

The Xbox is the only 3rd generation console to include a hard drive for saving games and burning music to. This hard drive makes games that were impossible to develop now possible only on Xbox. For example, the game Blinx: Time Sweeper, although it wasn’t the best game ever, had this simple idea, which was very complicated to actually put into a game. The general idea was that you were in this platform world and you have to collect time icons and when you had three that matched you could perform that action (rewind, record, pause etc.) and this is only possible on Xbox because without a hard drive to store the data that you would rewind, record to etc. it would be impossible.

Another aspect about the Xbox is Xbox Live - the online gaming service for Xbox. Playing against your mates who live nearby is fine but how about playing great games such as Rainbow Six 3 and Counter Strike against people from all over the world? This is what Xbox Live enables you to do. Each games enables you to communicate with your team mates and opponents with the Xbox Communicator. SP

Specifications

• Four game controller ports
• A front-loading DVD tray
• A multisignal audio-video connector
• An Ethernet port
• An NVIDIA graphics processing unit (GPU)
• An Intel 733MHz processor
  
• An internal hard drive