Privacy is always a concern when you're online, but the Xbox 360 lets you specify a variety of settings to make sure you only interact with the people you want to interact with. You can choose to allow messages, chat invites, and game invites from all users, only people on your friends list, or from nobody at all. If you're not comfortable with letting people see the games you've played or what you're currently doing online, you can also hide your online status, game history, and game achievements from other users. The privacy settings also let you limit who can see your personal motto, so don't worry about revealing your secret to success.
Extra-sensitive individuals will also be able to modify what kind of member-created content they can see in order to protect themselves from potentially subversive member content, like user-created Darwin fish, for example. At the very bottom of the privacy settings menu, you'll find options to opt in or opt out of Microsoft Xbox and partner-marketing spam. Unless you enjoy and get all of your information from advertisements, you probably want to opt out of these lists.
Building a Rep and Choosing a Zone
Your reputation rating starts at three out of five stars, and goes up or down depending on how other players rate you. If you're respectful in victory and graceful in defeat, you'll probably get positive feedback and a higher reputation. A rude braggart or a whiny loser, on the other hand, might get negative feedback from other players and get a lower reputation.
We've all been in multiplayer games where the player mix just didn't provide a good gaming experience. Dramatic skill and personality imbalances between players can make an online match less enjoyable for everyone involved. Microsoft has introduced a new gamer zone player-categorization concept to help similar player types find each other. You can choose one of four zones: recreation, family, pro, and underground. The recreation zone is meant for less-serious players who are just as interested in chatting as playing a game, and the family zone is meant for players with overprotective parents or conservative types seeking shelter from the real world. Skilled players have their own pro zone, and there's also an underground zone for griefers and foul-mouthed, chocolate milk demandin' kids.
The 360 keyboard entry screen is cleverly designed to make use of controller buttons to increase typing speed. You still need to select individual letters with the analog stick, but you can move the cursor, activate the caps lock, add spaces, delete letters, and select alternate symbol and accent character sets with controller buttons. Better yet, we were able to plug in a USB keyboard, and we were able to use it to enter and modify text without a problem.
The games tab lets you check up on your game achievements, played games history, Xbox Live Arcade games, demos, and trailers. Each Xbox 360 game will have a set number of achievements that you can accomplish to raise your gamer score. Additionally, each achievement will also appear in your gamer profile for everyone to see. If you beat a game or find all the secret items in a game, those achievements will be displayed in your gamer profile and your gamer score will increase. All downloads will run through the Xbox Live marketplace. Small items like game demos will be free to download, but you'll have to pony up some Microsoft points to get full Xbox Live Arcade games and other valuable downloads.
The Xbox 360 Digital Media Experience
The Dashboard Media page lets you access your music, pictures, and video media. The music player can play music files stored on the hard drive, a connected network PC, a CD, or from a portable music player like an iPod. Pictures are viewable from networked PCs, digital cameras, data CDs, or portable media devices. You can connect to Windows XP systems to listen to music or view pictures, but you can only play videos saved on the 360's HDD. You'll need to use a Windows Media Center PC if you want to stream video like movies or TV shows across the network to the 360.
The Xbox 360 can function as a digital media receiver that can access and play back media from PCs on the network. You'll need to install Windows Media Connect on your Windows XP system before you can access the system from the 360. The 360 Media page directed us to an Xbox Web site to download the program and set up the connection. But the site hasn't been updated with the necessary information yet since we're still a week away from launch. We'll have an update on the 360's digital media receiver features as soon as we get the features working. The console still worked fine as a DVD movie player. Just insert a DVD into the media tray and the movie will launch automatically. You can use an Xbox 360 wireless controller to navigate through the DVD for even easier movie watching.
We connected an iPod Shuffle to the system using a USB cable, and the 360 was able to recognize the Shuffle's name and play songs from the device without a problem. Our HDD came preloaded with a small MP3 song sampler, but we wasted no time in loading up the system with our own music. We popped a music CD into the system, and the 360 recognized our CD and displayed the album title and a complete song list. You can play songs or rip the CD to the hard drive from the 360's music player screen. Ripping an entire album to the hard drive takes a few minutes, but you can edit the song name, artist, and genre tags attached to each song while you wait. The music player has a 3D virtualization window that plays a cool graphics show in rhythm with the song. You can also use the gamepad to play with the virtualization to add a new level of interactivity.
Get used to ripping tracks from audio CDs because that's the only way we could get music onto the 360's HDD. The console could recognize and play MP3 songs from USB devices like memory sticks and portable media players, but we couldn't transfer songs over to the HDD. Similarly, the system could play songs from a data CD that contained MP3s, but we couldn't transfer the music directly to the system's HDD. The 360 can stream music from USB devices and data CDs, but it won't let you copy any songs from those sources.
You can save and edit playlists that you can access from the music player menu or from within games. The Xbox 360 also makes it very easy to access and play your own music in games. While playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2006, we hit the Xbox logo button on the controller to bring up the Xbox guide. You can access all of your music directly from the guide and instruct the system to play an entire album, a saved playlist, or just a single song. USB connectivity isn't limited to MP3 players, either. We were able to plug a Canon PowerShot digital camera to the 360, and the system photo viewer was able to display pictures stored on the camera's memory card. We ran a slide show and even set one of our favorite pictures as the background for our 360 Dashboard.
Overall, the media playback features that we were able to use all worked well, and we were especially impressed by how easy it was to rip CDs and create our own game soundtracks. We look forward to spending more time with the media connect features to see how well the system handles streaming data over the network. Keep your eyes on GameSpot's Xbox 360 Launch Center for all the latest Xbox 360 news, game previews, and hardware reports!
Microsoft Xbox 360 Hands-On Report
Find out about Microsoft's new Xbox 360 system in our special hands-on report!
