Xbox 360

So what exactly is all the fuss about? We take a look at the Xbox 360 hardware...

The blade system is certainly a very attractive way of organising the menu. There are four main blades. The first is for Xbox Live, where you can contact your friends or get downloads from the Marketplace. Here you'll find free items such as movie trailers, game demos and the like. But if you buy some Xbox Live points, you can spend these on Xbox Live Arcade games, graphical themes and other items.

Xbox Live Blade

Another of the main blades is where you control your media. It's here you can see the images you have stores on the console or watch videos. The music player allows you to listen to CDs, music you have stored on the 360 hard disk or stream from another device. It's possible to rip CDs to the hard drive and the console even connects online to a database that will fill in the CD track details for you.

Media Blade

The music player allows the user to select tracks based on artist, genre, album etc. and playback is of very good quality. Visualisations have been provided by game development Jeff Minter. It's great to see him involved with a project like this and his visualisations are gorgeous to behold.

Another blade features all the setup options to tailor your console to your needs. So it's here that you set whether you want to use a 4:3 TV or 16:9 or selection options for high definition or VGA gaming. There are options for surround sound too. Most welcome is the new parental control system, ensuring that responsible parents keep mature gaming content away from the kids.

The Xbox 360 hardware certainly is impressive. It's a gorgeous looking beast that feels more at home among DVD players and the like under your TV than any previous console. It's also rather girlfriend/wife friendly, as the use of wireless controllers means there are no cables lying around on the floor.

The options for media and the seamless integration into your home network and Xbox Live make for a truly great media experience. We've been promised this kind of functionality in games consoles for some time, but this is the first console to really make good on that promise.

But the most important aspect of any games console is the games. And from tomorrow I'll be looking at some of the launch games. For now let's be content with Xbox 360 as a piece of hardware, it's beautiful, it's powerful and it's here.