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RRP: £129.99 (Originally £299.99)

Amazon: £124.99 (April 2003)

The console received a rather unfair press reaction upon its launch, due to it not selling as fast as was initially expected and, hence, the reason why it didn't sell out on launch as the last-released console, the Sony Playstation 2, had. A price war with the Nintendo Gamecube didn't help as they slashed their price to £130 in time for launch day (May 3rd 2002), just one week after the Xbox's price cut but having had announced this after Microsoft's announcement of the then-impending price cut.

Look beyond that at what a console can actually do and although not many will be able to afford more than one console at a time, especially since they all require individual accessories for extra controllers, connections, etc., the Xbox has a lot going for it.

The first thing you'll notice about the Xbox is it's size. It's big. Much bigger than just about any other console that's gone before it and almost matches the size of the average VCR. However, if you're an AV nut and have your equipment set up in a rack or a tower you should be able to find a space for it.

All the connections on the unit are very accessible. Starting from the front, there's four controller ports, with the power and disc tray buttons in the middle. Round the back there's simply a slot for the power lead, modem connection (providing you have a broadband-enabled phone line) and an all-in-one AV port, as opposed to the PS2's separate optical digital output.

Since the console comes only with the standard composite phono video and audio lead connectors, those with an eye for quality will want to upgrade to one with a SCART connector and/or s-video, as well as Dolby Digital and DTS since many of the Xbox games make use of that audio facility. I wanted a lead which combined all three, but it was very hard to track down given that only Joytech appear to make one that does. It costs £14.99 and since it only appears to be available in branches of Dixons, this is the only time you'll find me recommending a trip to Dixons to actually buy something, as opposed to just nipping in to annoy the staff by asking them a difficult question like "what's overscan?"

Atop the unit forms an image of a large black "X", with grill edges either side and a green circle with the console's title inside.

No ports are necessary for memory cards though, since that's what the hard drive's for. It's also worth noting that the controllers come with vibration built in, so no need for such an add-on, although the controllers do come with two slots in their head for later additions.

What happens when you switch the Xbox on? A thumping, vibrating sound is heard as a green nucleus, keeping with the colour theme, manifests itself as if part of a genetic science experiment, before the 'camera' pans out to reveal the Xbox logo.

When the menu appears, three settings are presented: Memory, Music and Settings, with the appearance onscreen as if being set in a time tunnel, as the background eeriely shifts backwards and forwards, changing as it goes and to the sound of distant thunder and bizarre computer noises. Occasionally, you'll also hear what sounds like voice transmissions being picked up and played out like the voice synthesiser on a BBC Model B. Very odd, but quite cool. As you enter the sub-menus there's a "zooming" sound effect as you shoot through to them.

Memory refers to the amount of space on the hard drive reserved for your game saves, in the form of blocks. At first, and unless you save a lot of games on the drive, it says there are "50000+ blocks" available, even though I understand there are over 100,000. Either way, there's more than enough space available.

Music: Here's where you can play your audio CDs, with a small visual image akin to that of Windows Media Player as the console interprets what it hears. You can also copy the audio tracks onto the Xbox's hard drive so as to form the soundtrack for any game you wish to play which supports this feature, if you don't like any or all of the tracks within the game itself, with the option to rename the newly-recorded tracks correctly, but this can be rather cumbersome with the Xbox controller compared to a keyboard.

Note, that the Xbox doesn't have a recordable CD drive so you can't put these back onto another CD.

The Settings section allows you to alter the current date and time (with an option for time zone and daylight savings, i.e. putting the clocks back and forwards twice a year), menu language (English, Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Italian), Audio (a choice of Dolby Surround, Stereo or Mono, plus the enabling of Dolby Digital and DTS for those with the appropriate equipment) and Video (4:3, Letterbox 16:9 on a 4:3 TV, and anamorphic 16:9, plus support for PAL-60)

The "Auto Off" feature will shut down the console after six hours of inactivity, which is handy for those with children that would otherwise leave it on all day long whether they're using it or not, while the 'System Info' selection just gives a warning not to copy the Xbox software within the console.

Between this and the PS2's menu system, neither are overall better than the other, but I think both are equally fantastic.

Four of the Xbox's launch titles.
Click on the covers to see the reviews.

Games are the primary reason for buying an Xbox and of the 40 or so launch titles, the highlights definitely include first-person-shooter Halo, martial arts entertainment in Dead or Alive 3 and driver Project Gotham Racing, a follow-up to the Dreamcast's MSR. Reviews for all games, with more to come, are listed in the "Xbox Reviews" link on the left-hand menu.

Of course, with many titles coming out for more than one of the latest three consoles, a machine will stand or fall depending on its exclusives, which include the first and last of the three above, as well as two other titles for which reviews will be coming soon, as I type this (early July 2002), the latest in the series that began with Abe's Oddysee, Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee and the mystical Azurik: Rise of Perathia.

The downside is that many of these games are £44.99 when new and, unlike the PS2 there's no titles from a previous console which will be compatible on this unit, but the potential is clearly there for games of the future and if you shop around there should be a good deal out there.

Of course, there have been a few early titles which haven't lived up to their promise such as Amped, Blood Wake and Blood Omen 2. Graphically, they impress, but deep down you have to question where's the beef? See the reviews for individual reasons on each game.

Also, like the PS2, the Xbox has the ability to play DVDs and via both SCART and S-video, whereas the PS2 had initial 'green screen' issues when watching via SCART if it had to go through anywhere else apart from the TV, but in order to watch the DVDs you will need to purchase a DVD remote control (around £30), the sensor for which plugs into one of the controller ports.

It's rather on the sneaky side that an extra purchase would have to be made for this, but not for Microsoft when you consider the advantage for them.

Every DVD player attracts a percentage cost which must be paid out by the manufacturer, thus a form of tax. Although it's the unit which plays the DVDs, this tax is only limited to a percentage of the cost of the remote control since that is what enables the DVD facility. Strange, but true.

On the plus side, the video and audio quality when watching DVDs is excellent and I've no complaints when watching them via the Xbox compared to the Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player I use on my PC. Of course, though, it will only play region 2 or region-free DVDs as standard. I've not heard of Xboxes being chipped to play other regions, but surely it can't be long before a region hack can be found and it'll be one in the eye for the Hollywood hotshots who think region-encoding is a good idea.

The technical bit

NVIDIA XGPU 250 MHz 4 pixel pipelines 2 texels per pixel pipeline 8 texels per clock cycle (4 pixels with 2 texels per pixel) Maximum of 4 texture layers per rendering pass (done in 2 clock cycles) 1.0 gigapixel per second 2.0 gigatexels per second 4.0 billion anti-aliased samples per second Point, Bilinear, Trilinear, Anisotropic Mip-Map Filtering Perspective-Correct Texture Mapping DotProduct3 Bump Mapping (DOT3) Environment Mapped Bump Mapping (EMBM) Cubic Environment Mapping (CEM) Volumetric Textures (3D Textures) Z, Stencil, Shadow, and Multisampling buffers S3TC and DirectX DXT1-DXT5 texture compression Full-Scene Anti-Aliasing (2x, Quincunx, 4x) Programmable Pixel and Vertex Shading Processors 2 Vertex Pipelines 125 million particles per second 125 million polygons per second (peak) 100 million polygons per second (sustained) 60 million polygons per second (with effects) Triangle Tessellation Z-buffer compression and Hidden Surface Removal (HSR) based on early Z-test 1 trillion operations per second (1000 BOPS) 95 to 116 GFLOPS (estimated) Intel CPU Modified Pentium III 733 MHz 32-bit integer 80-bit floating-point (x87 FPU) 64-bit MMX (integer SIMD) 128-bit SSE (4x 32-bit precision floating-point SIMD) 32KB L1 cache (16KB instruction + 16KB data) 128KB L2 cache 1980 Dhrystone 2.1 MIPS 2.93 GFLOPS (SSE) XGPU to CPU bus Intel P6 GTL+ bus protocol 64 bits wide 133 MHz 1.067 gigabytes per second bandwidth NVIDIA MCPX (Media Communications Processor) 200 MHz Audio Processing Unit (APU) 256 Total Voices 64 3D Voices + 192 2D Voices Setup Engine - all memory management, mapping, and DMA resources are controlled in this unit Voice Processor - 3 fixed function DSP units for processing voices and mixing the results in the mixer buffers Global Processor - a programmable DSP for adding varied effects to the data in the mixer buffers and producing the final output stream Dolby Digital Interactive Content Encoder - a programmable DSP for encoding into a Dolby Digital (AC-3) stream Downloadable Sounds Version 2 (DLS2) 10/100 Base-T Ethernet USB, DVD, and HDD Controller XGPU to MCPX bus AMD HyperTransport 8 bits wide 400 MHz (800 MHz effective) 800 megabytes per second bandwidth Main Memory Micron 64 Megabytes DDR (Double Data Rate) SDRAM 128 bits wide 200 MHz (400 MHz effective) 400 megabits per second per pin 6.4 gigabytes per second bandwidth Storage internal 8 Gigabyte Hard Disk Drive DVD-ROM DVD-9 disc format (8.54 Gigabytes) memory cards

So what's next for the Xbox? One thing I'm most looking forward to is the launch of Xbox Live, the online gaming community from Microsoft, which will make use of the console's broadband connection. Reports have already come through that many people have got their Xbox online already by using it in conjuction with their PC and the right website, but if I understand it correctly, I'd need a hub in order to link my PC together with the Xbox first, which is something I don't have so I'll wait for the official launch.

Microsoft are also committed to spending $2bn over the next five years promoting the Xbox so it'll be intriguing to see what happens. It's now down to the games developers to put the required effort into their gaming products instead of making us wonder "looks nice, but.. so?", as I alighted to earlier, since we're finally getting arcade graphics like we're used to outside our own homes and with the price drop to £199, I already know some people who have gone out and bought one in addition to their PS2.

OVERALL

Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2002.

DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: