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For now, new Xbox is just pretty pictures

By JOSH KORR
Published November 22, 2005

	[Times photo: Dirk Shadd]
	Settled in for a long Xbox wait St. Petersburg residents Blake Lusty, 16, left, and his grandfather Cameron Lusty, 89, camp as Tina Bulley, 23, also of St. Petersburg, watches a DVD with her dog Tucker while waiting to buy the new Xbox 360 at the Best Buy at 6600 22nd Avenue N in St. Petersburg on Monday night. About 50 people had lined up outside the store near Tyrone Square Mall on Monday waiting for the newest version of the game system to go on sale. Another 25 or so Xbox fans lined up at a nearby Circuit City. Several said they came to be the first one of their friends to own the video game console. Others wanted one to wrap up as a Christmas present.

It's hard to get too excited about the Xbox 360.

You can tell right away that the game system is powerful. Certainly, no other console has needed a power supply the size of a starter log, and video game quarterbacks have never looked so three-dimensional.

But the next generation of games, which began with the choreographed release of the new Xbox at 12:01 a.m. today, is supposed to offer more than just pretty pictures. At this point, the 360 doesn't.

Microsoft has done a lot of things right with its heavily hyped entertainment box. Power brick aside, the sleek white console breaks new aesthetic ground for the electronics junk that sits under a TV.

The Dashboard menu interface makes the 360 feel like more than just a gaming machine, allowing for easy cycling between games, other media and the online Xbox Live service.

After a quick download to my PC, I could play music and view photos from the computer on the 360. My digital camera connected successfully, but my Creative Nomad Jukebox Zen MP3 player didn't.

I was able to test only a handful of 360 titles, all Electronic Arts games, but the system's graphics potential is clear. Cars in Need for Speed: Most Wanted are brilliantly clear; the jagged edges that plague the original Xbox version of the game are gone. In two other games , Madden 06 and NBA Live 06, you no longer can tell that players are made up of polygons. Their skin is smooth; they move much more like actual people.

The problem is, the visual luster wears off after about five minutes, and you realize these are otherwise the same games as on PlayStation 2 and Xbox.

That makes those amazing graphics seem a little less spectacular. The character models have this weird shine to them, like they're made from plastic.

As long as the video game Tim Duncan didn't actually look like the real NBA star Tim Duncan, there was no pretending the two were the same. Now the graphics force our brains to compare game and reality. The digital Duncan's skin is too rigid; the minute movements of hair and muscle that we subconsciously register are replaced by Silly Putty stasis.

In time, I'm sure this graphics conundrum will get solved. There will undoubtedly be many original games. The Xbox Live Marketplace service could end up offering some cool downloads, though being able to buy game pictures for a quarter is useless to me. And for the cost of an iPod, you can't go wrong (don't bother with the $299 Core System, though).

Still, despite the hype and the rush to beat Sony's PlayStation 3, Microsoft is pretty much selling a promise. For now, there's no reason to take them up on it.

--Josh Korr can be reached at http://www.sptimes.com/blogs/videogames/

[Last modified November 22, 2005, 02:15:27]