While I’ve been giving the Xbox brand quite a bit of praise I’ve also given the Playstation brand quite a bit of grief. For the same reasons that the Xbox has moved in directions I’ve been pleased with the Playstation brand has moved in directions that turned me off. At my core I’m a gamer, and I’ll buy ANY console the delivers what I’m looking for regardless of my opinion of the company. I’m also not one to waste my money on promises and future potential. As someone who spends easily thousands each year on my hobby I don’t have money to waste on products that I’ll just be sitting on. I can say with confidence that as much as I despise Sony I despise Microsoft even more but like a good consumer I buy their products anyway… lets hear it for capitalism.

With that said I will, and without hesitation, buy a Playstation 3 the very moment there is something that console offers that will compel me to purchase it. I don’t HATE the Playstation 3 but I will call out the brand on their missteps (as I feel ALL good consumers should) and I do the same for the Xbox and Nintendo brands as well, they just give me a whole lot less to complain about.

So why haven’t I bought a PS3 yet? Well, at the moment there are a few interesting things on the console but it doesn’t actually offer me anything that compels me to buy it, this is compounded by the fact that the price is rather steep for an item that doesn’t actually do anything I’m interested in seeing it do. I have the cash, that’s not a problem, and many of the promised features and games seem interesting but as I said before I wont part with the cash until those promises become a reality, I have better things to spend it on like games. After all isn’t that really what we’re spending all this money to play with?
I started thinking about what Sony would have to offer for me to go to the store and buy a PS3 tomorrow. Granted I wouldn’t do it unless I could take the console home and see the fruits of these things with first hand immediacy, this discredits everything that comes out “soon” or “this holiday” or “next year”. Again, there are games that are out now for other platforms that I want to play NOW so blowing several hundred dollars for a Chia-pet is worthless when I already own a few full grown ferns. Even still I don’t think many of these would be all that difficult for them to do, heck they’d be well served to do all of them. So without further ado here are the 6 reasons (none of which exist at the present) I would buy a PS3.

1. At least 6 must-have exclusive and original titles a year. A “must-have” title is defined by ME. Honestly Games like Motorstorm and Resistance didn’t really interest me and I would define neither of them as “Must-have” I’m talking about games that I see a trailer for and start salivating at the mouth thinking about how cool it would be to play it. Resident Evil does that for me, as does the Devil May Cry series, both are titles that helped fuel the purchase decisions of the Gamecube and PS2 last generation. In terms of recently released games The Darkness really excited me as does the up coming Bioshock and lots of other titles, unfortunately I don’t see anything exclusive on the PS3 radar this year that falls into that category.

These games have to be exclusives because I already own every other console, so if it’s a cross platform title there is really no good reason for me to buy a PS3 since I can already play it on something else I own. Online wise the 360 has a more compelling offering and graphically the differences between the 360 and PS3 are marginal at best so neither one of those would get me to buy the PS3 version over the 360 version anyway.

I say these have to be original titles because with the exception of two or three franchises within the Sony brand their franchisees don’t really interest me. Ratchet and Clank, F1 Racing, Jax and Dexter, etc. just don’t interest me. so really they’d have to branch out into new franchises if they’d want to create titles that I’d define as a must have.

I say 6 of these titles due to the console’s price. I’m not going to spend over half a grand just to play one or two titles. I’d need fresh and exciting gaming experiences at least every other month from the box. If the console’s price was lower I could justify less titles but at $500-$600 it needs to deliver strong and consistently. By comparison the Wii only had three available titles I was interested in, but that’s all it needed considering it’s price tag.

2. An achievement system standardized across all games with required developer support and accessibility over the web. I’m an achievement whore, if you read my articles with any consistancy you’ll know that. Though, my addiction to these things aren’t just some side effect of the Xbox Koolaide. Actually this is the way I’ve played games for the last decade years or so.

In college my friends and I started logging what we called a “dead games list” whenever we started a new game we’d come up with requirements and if you played through and met the requirements you “killed” the game and could add it to the dead games list. Essentially the requirements were always that you explored every last little aspect of the game to the fullest and defeated the game on the highest difficulties possible. A fighting game for instance would require you beat the game on the hardest difficulty with every character, as well as unlocking every character, costume or anything else that could be unlocked. If the game was on the dead games list you could be assured that you mastered the game and saw absolutely every thing there was to see.

When MS came out with achievements it was like they built my dead games list into the console itself. And making those stats accessible over the web through Xbox.com gave it legs. I’m now a member of several communities of like minded gamers. Achievements for me are like a gift, like someone finally understood the way I liked to play games and built this system just for me. I know for a fact I’m not the only person who feels this way and I must say every other console on the planet now feels like LESS of a console because they’re missing this feature. Even if you’re not achievement obsessed there is no denying that it can extend the replay value of a game substantially, which is always a good thing no matter how you look at it.

I’ve been following this development on the PS3 pretty closely from the copycat entitlement system, to the now planned trophy system. Like most things with the PS3 it has potential, but I can’t play with potential. I can’t have fun with it, and it’s not worth anything, let alone $600. The trophy system could be the single greatest thing Sony’s done with the PS3, or or could be lame, under-supported niche feature only used by one or two games. Once again I’ll hold on to my money until it proves itself as worthwhile.

3. A guarantee of level of service audio visual fidelity: all developers MUST support 720p and 4xMSAA, online must integrate with the console’s built in profile system. While it’s true that most PS3 games offer 720p graphics or better. There is really no standard to that effect, as an owner of a PS3 there is no guarantee that every game you buy will support that resolution. While it’s highly likely to be the case in terms of 720p it is definitely NOT the case in other areas. The lack of FSAA in most of the games I’ve played is some kind of cruel joke. Playing Ridge Racer 7 and Virtua Fighter 5 and having my eyeballs cut on the sharp graphical jaggies is so very reminiscent of when I brought home a PS2 and questioned it’s superiority to the Dreamcast for the very same reason. This is the 7th console generation, High Def, surround sound, X million FLOPS, and we can’t be bothered to smooth out the edges of the 3d models. Maybe MS’s requirement that developers use FSAA and 720p does tie the hands of developers. But it’s those same requirements that IMO made the Dreamcast and the Gamecube keep a consistently high level of graphical quality across all of their games.

This consistancy goes beyond graphics into other areas including the online experience and a profile with all of your preferences and stats built in. This all falls under what I was saying earlier about stuff that MS is doing in the console space that I’ve been begging for for years. I actually played the PS2 version of DOA2 instead of the Dreamcast version despite the fact that I like the DC controller more and thought the DC version’s graphics were better. The PS2 version offered a profile system. Rather than having no stat tracking at all when we passed around the controller during our weekly tournaments on the DC I could keep a personal profile and not have it messed up by everyone else I was playing with. That was with one game, I’m spoiled now that I have a password protected profile consistent across all games. Once again this might tie the hands of some developers but I say: screw em, because I like it this way and it seems to be the only real way to get some consistancy in the industry.

4. A $300 or less price tag with HD cables and a headset included. I couldn’t write this article without bring up the price issue. The Sony fanclub likes to draw comparisons about how the Xbox 360 is more expensive once you buy an HD-DVD player and pay for Xbox Live or how the Wii isn’t so cheap once you buy three more Remotes and a golden chalice. The fact of the matter is I DONT WANT those things. I have no intention of ever buying the HD-DVD attachment, and if Sony offered the PS3 without Blu-Ray for even $5 less I would probably buy that version over the one they offer now because as long as this format war rages on I’m not going to fund terrorism on either side.

You know what accessories I DO need though? HD-Cables so I can actually use more than 1/20th of the console’s performance power, as well as a headset so I can pretend that my multiplayer games are actually more than just single player games with a really “creative” AI. Interesting enough those are two accessories that the PS3 just doesn’t come with. yeah I know I can order an HDMI cable online for $10 but you know what I don’t want to go to Best Buy, spend $600 on a PS3 to take it home and buy a Cable online while I wait 6-8 for the cable to arrive before I can really play it. Nor do I want to drop the $70-$100 that Best Buy wants to charge me for the same plastic wrapped copper.

Considering that, and considering that there are a few (very few) games for the console that I’d like to play right now the optimal price would have to be $300 with HD cables and a headset included. This ties in with the earlier comment on the number of games the console needs. Either they need more games to justify the price or they need a lower price to justify the games. As it sits right now, neither the games nor the price justifies a purchase.

5. PS1 and PS2 games rendered in HD with 4xMSAA. I do love quite a few PS1 and PS2 games, but I do also own both of those consoles. Really the BC feature of the PS3 doesn’t do anything for me. Upscaling graphics is a sham, particularly when I own a projector with a Faroudja DCDi that can scale the games from a PS2 much better than the PS3′s software scaler ever will.

What would make the BC experience enjoyable would be if the PS3 were to actually render those old games in a higher resolution and apply 4xMSAA on top of it. I remember when I first got Bleem! on my PC it was amazing to see all my favorite PS1 games rendered (not scaled) at 3 times their normal resolution. Everything was crystal clear, there were no jaggies and it was just fantastic. I became disenfranchised by the PS2′s graphical capabilities long before the HD generation and now that I’ve been playing games in HD for almost 2 years even the PS2 games that I’d love to go back and play become hard to stomach due to the graphics distracting from the core experience. If the PS3′s horsepower was used to render the games natively in HD I would drive to the store right now and buy one simply because it would let me experience all of the great PS2 games I missed by letting me enjoy them with real HD graphics.

6. Toshiba announces that they’re retiring the HD-DVD format and gives the market to Blu-Ray. Fat chance of this happening but truth be told it would make me buy a PS3. As I said earlier, I don’t buy into the whole format war. I’ve got thousands saved waiting to pounce on a format and start building an HD collection. I’ve got nearly 500 DVDs in my collection, mostly special editions and box sets. I’m a collector. And there is no way I’m going to drop so much as a dime if I think there is even a hint of a chance that it will become obsolete before it’s time. There are even movies I love that I’ve avoided buying because I want to buy them once, and in HD.

While I’m not the biggest fan of using my game console for movie playback I think a PS3 wouldn’t be that bad of an HD player, especially considering it’s software updatability. Despite the back and forth between the two camps and the doom an gloom surrounding Blu-Ray’s ever growing market dominance it’s still squabbling over peanuts. Sure Blu-Ray might have sold 10K more copies of movie X last month but it doesn’t change the fact that both of them combined were outsold by millions of the regular DVD version. It’s like proclaiming your product has market dominance because it has 1.2% of the market while your competitor only has .9%. Wake me up when things actually start changing beyond these petty marketing games about how perception is the new reality.
So those are the six things that would get me to buy a PS3. If any of them happen I will buy one, mark my words. If you don’t agree with these things, I don’t really care because these are the things I care about, not you. Though I do think that much of the market does at least have a few things in common with this view point. I also don’t think it would be all too difficult for Sony to make these changes. Some of them I’m sure will eventually happen, but I’m not about to buy the console just to sit around and dream about that day. I’ll be busy playing all the other consoles and I’ll buy a PS3 when it’s ready to be played the way I like to play games.

The Blockbuster Support:
I’m sure many of you have heard the recent news about Blockbuster’s added support for Blu-Ray. Maybe you’ve even read the subsequent anonymous source from an anonymous location making claims about the aftermath of the news. Before I get into what this means lets look at some facts.

Blockbuster made available for rent both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD movies in 250 of it’s corporate owned stores for a number of months. After looking at the rental data they saw some 70% of the total rentals for the two formats going towards the Blu-Ray format. After those results they decided to start offering Blu-Ray discs at some 1450 of their corporately owned locations.

That’s what we know from the article, now some other facts you might not realize: Blockbuster has over 7000 locations, so 1450 is still a small percentage of their stores, they also still carry HD-DVD both through their mail based rental service as well as the original 250 test locations. This also doesn’t say anything for other rental services and stores such as Netflix or Movie Gallery or any other place that hasn’t even made a token effort towards picking a side. So what we’re seeing here is added support for Blu-Ray for a small percentage of one rental chain.

In terms of Blockbuster’s intended effect this really doesn’t mean much, it’s more of an extended test bed, Blu-Ray making it into Beta testing if you will. In all likelihood the higher percentage they saw was due to PS3 owners looking to try out the Blu-Ray feature on their new console. Even home theater fanatics who have purchased players for both formats are probably renting more Blu-Ray simply because there is more content available on the Blu-Ray format.

What this really means is something a lot bigger, I don’t think it was Blockbuster’s intent but in terms of where consumers put their money, perception is everything, and this genuinely small potatoes story has been blown very much out of proportion to the point where it actually does make difference. It doesn’t matter what the facts are, what matters is how consumers see the news and this news has been presented and hyped such to look like the beginning of the end for HD-DVD. The real support for Blu-Ray here didn’t come from Blockbuster, it came from the news outlets that hyped it up to be a much much bigger deal than it really should have been.

The Install Base:
According to the Digital Entertainment Group Blu-Ray hardware has outsold HD-DVD hardware by a five to one ratio. with Blu-Ray having an install base in the US of about 1.5 million and HD-DVD having an install base of about 300 thousand. That seems like a pretty big differentiation between the two. When you take a closer look at the numbers you’ll see that only 100 thousand Blu-Ray players are stand alone players while the remaining 1.4 million were included with the PS3. Meanwhile 150 thousand of the HD-DVD players sold were standalone players with the remaining 150 thousand being sold as Xbox 360 add-on drives.

It stands to reason that all 300 thousand HD-DVD hardware owners made their purchase because they wanted an HD-DVD player, and at least 100 thousand Blu-Ray owners made their purchase because they wanted a Blu-Ray player with the remaining 1.4 million Blu-Ray drives from PS3 sales being a big uncertainty.

That big uncertainty could be used to make the market look which ever way you want it to look. The reality is that uncertainty aside the HD formats on a whole are selling pretty poorly when you compare it to the market it’s attempting to replace. Looking at DEG’s numbers for DVD hardware sales in the US some 33 million DVD players were sold last year in the US with an install base close to 200 million. When you compare it to those numbers you find that Blu-Ray and DVD combine equate to less than one percent of the entire disc based movie market.

DEG also reported last year that HDTV penetration broke the 30 million mark last year in the US. When you compare the sub 2 million penetration of both blue laser formats combine they’re still not even selling to a sizable chunk of HDTV market on a whole. Even if they were to reach 100% penetration within the HDTV market it still has a substantial ways to go before it could hope to sell even close to the level of DVD.

Once again none of the facts matter when you’re dealing with perception If people think your format is squashing the competition they’re more likely to bite.

The Media Sales:
Certainly if there is uncertainty in whether or not the PS3 owners are using their console for Blu-Ray movies or not it would be apparent when comparing the sales figures of Blu-Ray movies to that of HD-DVD. Up until recently there actually haven’t been any real figures released. Most figures were extrapolated from Amazon.com rankings and other very unscientific sources. Luckily Neilsen VideoScan released some concrete numbers last February.

Looking at the year to date numbers Blu-Ray is outselling HD-DVD by 2:1. Certainly not reflective of the hardware penetration but definitely beneficial for Blu-Ray. Alternatively HD-DVD has still sold more overall since it’s release.

This can be interpreted in two different ways, either Blu-Ray is simply riding high off it’s relative newness since last holiday was when it first started getting a decent library together while HD-DVD owners had already got past the initial excitement. Or you could look at it as Blu-Ray simply selling at a higher rate then HD-DVD and likely to surpass them eventually. Either way, it’s still far too early to tell and in general these figures simply tell us that it’s still a really close race.

Once again when you look at the cumulate HD movie sales in comparison to DVD the two formats are really just squabbling over peanuts. Seeing as Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have sold about 2 million movies cumulatively since their inception DVD sold over 1.6 Billion movies in 2006. At the level that both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are selling all it takes is one major release to turn the tides one direction or the other, and with the numbers so close and so low neither format is really going anywhere fast.

The Studio Support:
In the end content is king, all sales figure aside looking at the studio support should give the clearest view of what the market holds in the future, right? So lets look at which movie houses support which format:

Blu-Ray Exclusive:
Columbia Pictures
MGM
Disney
20th century Fox
Lionsgate
Starz Home Entertainment

Cross Platform Support:
Paramount Pictures
DreamWorks
Warner Bros. Pictures (Although a number of titles are HD DVD exclusive at the present)
Warner Music Group
New Line Cinema
HBO
Studio Canal
Image Entertainment (including the Discovery Channel)
Magnolia Pictures
Brentwood Home Video
Ryko
Koch/Goldhil Entertainment

and adult films by:
Vivid Entertainment

HD-DVD Exclusive:
Universal Studios (including subsidiaries Rogue Pictures, Focus Features and Polygram Filmed Entertainment)
The Weinstein Company (including Dimension Films and Genius Products)
First Look Studios

and adult film studio support by:
Wicked Pictures
Pink Visual
Bang Bros
Digital Playground Inc.
ClubJenna Inc. (now part of Playboy Enterprises)

In terms of sheer number of supporters there are more studios making movies in both formats then there are on either side of the fence definitively. World wide HD-DVD has the most exclusive support while Blu-Ray has the most support in the US. Big studios like Universal, Disney, and Fox picking sides does a lot to shake things up, but you also have big studios like Paramount, Dreamworks, and Warner Bros. that are cross-platform. So looking at this aspect doesn’t tell us much except there are a few good moves that will either come out on one format or the other, and a lot of movies that will come out for both.

The Adult Film Issue:
Lots of people cite the overwhelming support from the Adult film for the HD-DVD format as the kiss of death for Blu-Ray. This support is more of a political issue as Sony, much like in the Betamax days, refuses to license the technology to adult film makers. Adult film studio Vivid Entertainment managed to find someone to manufacture them unofficial Blu-Ray discs despite Sony’s refusal, even still they’re a cross-platform supporter.

Support from adult film studios was certainly instrumental in helping VHS win over Betamax back in the day. Being able to playback movies in the privacy of your own home for the first time was a big advantage for VHS. These days many would argue that it’s not as important as a majority of adult content is now accessed online. Looking at this argument from a factual standpoint sales of DVD content sold made roughly 24.1 Billion in the US in 2006 of that 3.62 Billion was contributed by the Adult film industry in the form of DVD sales and rentals. That means the adult film industry controls more than 15% of the market for all DVD sales and rentals.

Cost of Ownership:
Certainly being a cheaper format has it’s advantages in terms of luring in consumer dollars. But which format has the lowest cost of ownership? HD-DVD certainly came out of the gate at a lower price point in terms of hardware as well as discs. This isn’t all that surprising as the players completed development long before Blu-Ray and was released earlier than Blu-Ray. The design of the disc also lends itself to looser tolerances within the hardware which in-turn allows them to be produced cheaper, the disc similarities to DVD also allows them to be manufactured on DVD machines with few changes. Blu-Ray on the other hand requires completely new machines to manufacture.

How has this played out? Well the cost of HD-DVD ownership has dropped substantially. Xbox 360 owners can pickup an HD-DVD drive for $200 and stand alone players are selling for as low as $300 these days. On the other hand Blu-Ray’s cheapest players are still up in the $500s.
The cost of the media has gone the other way. While HD-DVD is easier to manufacture it would seem the economics of scale have worked in Blu-Ray’s favor as most Blu-Ray titles are selling around $5 cheaper than similar HD-DVD movies. This holds true not just for cross format releases but on average. I can only assume this is due to the numerous PS3 games being produced on Blu-Ray and helping to drive down the cost of the format on a whole.

Again this makes it difficult to judge the two formats, on a long enough timeline cheaper media would win, however as time goes on I’m sure both formats will drop in price, Though, the stark difference in player costs today would allow any consumer entering the HD market to purchase quite a few movies before even approaching the cost of just a Blu-Ray player. The price differences will play a bigger role this holiday season, but right now neither seems to be making much of a difference.
The End Result:
From a purely technical feature and manufacturing standpoint I’ve always felt that HD-DVD was the superior product. At this point I really don’t care which format, I just want one of them to disappear so I can start buying discs on the other one, I suspect my sentiments are not unique. I collect DVDs as it is and I’ve bought nothing but TV shows and Anime over the last year (generally SD/ED only content) as I wait for signs of a clear cut winner. At the moment I think Blu-Ray has the better ‘vibe’ going for it what with the recent Blockbuster announcement, cheaper media prices and a whole lot of PS3 owners who just happen to also own a Blu-Ray player.

The problem with determining a victor at this point is the market is so incredibly small that even something as pathetic as Blockbuster announcing that they’re increasing Blu-Ray from 3% of their locations to 20% of their locations seems to have a monumental effect on the feeling in the blue laser disc market.

The real winner? That would be video streaming and download services like Comcast’s “On Demand” which by the end of 2006 was serving some 12.7 million people in the US. When you consider that is just one provider out of many others that offer similar services you have to question of either HD-DVD or Blu-Ray will ever reach the levels that DVD enjoys today. When you consider that the supposed revolutionary IPTV services haven’t even rolled out yet you have to wonder if HD-DVD and Blu-Ray will wind up the DVD-Audio and SACDs of the Movie world where services like “On Demand” play the role of the MP3; coming in from behind and sweeping the consumers up while the fancy new physical media formats fade away into obscurity. I really hope this doesn’t happen, I like my physical media, I still buy CDs and I even buy DVD-Audio discs when I can (I’ve yet to find a single album on SACD that I like). I just call it like I see it and from what I see both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD have a very very long road ahead if they want to replace DVD and remain strong in the face of alternative content delivery systems.

In light of that I’ve created a list of 20 dashboard and guide features that I feel would add tremendous benefit to the Xbox 360 console (at least it will give them something to think about for 2007′s fall update). There’s a lot to cover here so rather then delivering it all at once I’ve decided to make it a four part series spanning four days this week (that’s five features a day for the mathematically inept). Part 1 starts off with Media and A/V features… enjoy.

MEDIA OPTIONS

1. More versatile streaming support
The Xbox 360 and PS3 have been poised as media center hubs in addition to just being game machines, though as someone who has built several media center machines out of PC or Xbox 1 bits I can tell you that the Xbox 360 is a joke in this regard. I understand MS’s undying need for self promotion though incessant product inbreeding but a little leeway in this regard could go a long way towards broadening their user base. Streaming from discs and USB devices is a good start but network streaming is limited to Windows XP and MCE machines, not only that but those machines are also required to run a special streaming program. I think basic SMB streaming support would be hugely beneficial. It would allow for users to stream from Mac and Linux PCs as well as Older Windows PCs, and there’s less for the user to setup. Similarly iTunes Streaming would be beneficial as well, the user-base of iPod owners is huge, hooking up your iPod via USB is one thing but allowing those people to stream the same iTunes music from the PC would be even better.

2. Support for additional media formats.
The Spring update will supposedly include some form of MPEG-4 support but even that leaves a lot to be desired in this department. I hear constant whining for Divx and Xvid support. I realize that these are heavily used for pirate material but I know quite a few who encode all of their home movies in these formats as well. They offer the best picture quality per byte of any other video format. Similarly Additional audio formats like the various Lossless formats would be very well received. You could probably also go further then that and allow the console to accept XM and Sirius radio streams over the net. Obviously many of these codecs come with a price. Even legal Divx users are required to pay for the use of the codec on the PC. So why not offer all of these things as a-la-carte downloads? You want Divx? Ok, fork over 800MS points and you can stream Divx. Gamers get the support they they want, and MS gets some extra cash, what’s the loss here? Not to mention I’m sure the satellite radio companies would love to have their content accessible on the console for subscribers in the same way they have it available on the PC. Make it a paid download and everyone gets to add a big new bullet to their feature list. Listing to satellite radio while I game is just an awesome prospect IMO, especially if I can get more use out of a service I already pay for.

A\V OUTPUT

3. Improved Surround Sound Audio Processing
This is more of a bug fix then a feature request. I hear lots of complaints about how the Xbox 360 handles stereo audio over surround sound. The problem is that when you stream music from an iPod or your PC it comes in as stereo and the Xbox 360 only outputs to the front left and front right speakers on surround sound systems, while true that they’re only outputting stereo sound from a stereo source most of the time the music winds up sounding horribly flat. Most HTIB systems rely heavily on the sub-woofer for low end sound. With the Xbox 360 processing Stereo audio the way it does the sub-woofer isn’t being used for the audio. What would be nice is if users could set a flag to have low end frequencies from their stereo audio mixed into the sub-woofer, similarly they could add a feature to mix the music across all speakers in the surround sound system. Using your own audio is nice but when it sounds like crap coming out of two tiny tin-can sounding satellite with no low end, it’s almost not even worth it.

Another audio problem that needs fixing is the digital audio clipping. The 360 fails to send a “pulse” signal with the digital audio so When a game or DVD goes silent the digital signal goes dead and causes most auto-switching digital receivers to hiccup with a few seconds of no audio. It’s quite annoying and needs to be fixed if the console is to be taken seriously as a media device.

Finally HD-DVDs when output over an optical connection (which is probably most people who have purchased the HD-DVD add-on), The audio track outputs at about half the volume it should be and also loses a good portion of it’s detail in the process. This is another glaring oversight on MS’s part. As if HD-DVD playback on the 360 wasn’t enough of a joke already due to the lack of an HDMI port for proper HDCP. It’s rumored that the Spring update will fix the audio issues (and the elite edition of the console will “fix” the HDMI “problem), it’s not in the press release though so we’ll see if it does.

4. Improved VGA support
The addition of VGA output as a feature is great, gone are the days of using a crappy Component video transcoder for getting console graphics on your PC monitor. Though I think it still needs quite a bit of work before it’s really as good as it needs to be. The resolutions available now are good but there needs to be more: 800×600, hugely common on low end projection systems; 1366×768, very common on larger LCD and Plasma displays, certainly more common then the 1360×768 already supported by the 360; 1440×900 and 1680×1050, easily the two most common widescreen resolutions found on PC monitors. How they couldn’t have neglected support for those last two simply blows my mind.

Beyond just adding resolution they need to also add more control over how the image is interpreted at that resolution. For instance if I have a widescreen plasma display with a 1024×768 native resolution, I’d like for the 360 to output a widescreen image scaled to that resolution, instead I’m stuck with a 4:3 image because the console assumes it’s a 4:3 display based on the chosen resolution. Letter-boxing would be great too. if I have a 1280×1024 monitor I might really like to view games in their native 720p resolution letter-boxed on my screen. Again the Xbox 360 assumes I want the content in 4:3. If the scaling hardware is really as slick as they make it sound these should be as simple as adding a few options in the dashboard, and it would add a huge amount of versatility to the platform’s output capabilities.
Also with VGA is the needed ability to select the colorspace used. Without this ability half of the displays on the market wind up looking washed out when used with VGA. It’s rumored that the Spring update will actually fix this, lets hope it does.

Never mind the above issues many Backward compatible Xbox 1 games simply wont output over VGA. As it is now VGA output is somewhat of a half hearted attempt. Honestly features like these shouldn’t “evolve” over the life of the console they need to be researched, designed, tested and implemented ONCE and ONLY ONCE. It’s crap like this that reminds us that the Xbox apple doesn’t always fall so far from the Microsoft tree. I think they need to realize that while they might be ahead in the console race right now they don’t own the console market, and consumers wont stand for that kind of half-hearted implementation when they’re not dealing with a monopoly.

5. Brightness Contrast and Color
The ability to tweak the output image right from the dashboard would be very beneficial. Usually this sort of thing is left up to to the display device itself but it does have some merit being in the dashboard. While TVs usually offer these options in the PC world these tweaks are done right in the OS, meaning that a great many PC monitors wont allow you to adjust those things. Not to mention many setups have multiple devices going into the same display so if the display is tweaked to look good on some other device, it might be a little off on the 360 and it’d be nice to compensate for that right in the dashboard.

One needn’t look any further then the vast number of games that offer basic brightness and contrast controls right within their own options menus. If this kind of control wasn’t needed in the console do you really think game developers would have bothered to add the option?

The State of HD Gaming – Past Present and Future