Next came Yusuf Mehdi, the smiley Senior Vice President of the Online Audience Business Group, who spent his time on stage going over Xbox’s Snap Mode, which appears to be a jumped-up version of some of the features that the Kinect offers for navigating the dashboard. Although the transitions between movies, music, gaming, and live TV look seamless, none of that stuff speaks to me as a gamer as a particularly strong selling point for my next video game console. (Also, I know the announcement was held at 10 o’clock in the morning and the selection isn’t the greatest, but is The Price is Right — tired-looking Drew Carrey and all — really the image of cutting edge modernity you want etched into our brains as we walk away from this?)
This just SCREAMS next-gen.
Mehdi also touched on the integration of Skype as a sidebar that can pop up and let you have a chat while you continue whatever other task you were involved in. He illustrated this by having a Skype chat during the presentation with his pal D.J. where they ribbed each other about their fantasy football teams in what had to be one of the stiffest, most unnatural scripted conversations I’ve ever seen. (Oh, you guys are just a couple of cut-up executives, messin’ around, giving each other grief!)
The next guy to come out was Marc Whitten, Corporate Vice President of Xbox Live, who talked about the “magic and science” of the Xbox One, giving us a little bit of info about what’s under the hood of this bad boy. Whitten listed 8 gigs of RAM, a 500 gig hard drive, and 5 billion transistors. Then, the VP went on to show the new Kinect camera, which looks a lot more sturdy and capable than its predecessor and boasts face recognition. The new controller was displayed for about 10 whole seconds, and danged if it doesn’t look a whole lot like the old controller (which, to be fair, people have very little issues with.) Because the Kinect is boxed in with the Xbox One, we can expect to see quite a bit of Kinect integration into controller-oriented games, like it or not.
The next person to come out was EA’s Andrew Wilson to announce a “very special relationship between Electronic Arts and Microsoft,” with logos for the FIFA, NBA Live, Madden, and UFC franchises displayed behind him. Another reel played where professional athletes from all of the previously mentioned sports talked about how much of a head game all of their respective sports were. We all know that if there’s one group of people who know video games, it’s pro athletes. All of the sports footage looked to be in-game, powered by what is apparently a new engine called Ignite.
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