The Xbox 360, a parental guide to this game console.

XBOX 360

Xbox 360 is the next generation of the Microsoft Xbox. The Xbox 360 can easily be compared to a computer designed for gamming. Most of the games available work on most of the newer Microsoft platforms, (windows).

Xbox 360, (http://www.xbox.com).

There are two versions of the Xbox 360, the "Xbox 360" and the "Xbox 360 Core System".

The most important difference between the two is the detachable 20 Gb hard drive. This makes the use of previous Xbox games possible.
As well as to play original Xbox game, the Xbox 360 enable you to play online.
The new Xbox 360 offers very attractive incentives for game developers to release new titles.

Technical background

The Xbox 360 can easily be compared to a media computer. The graphic card is a powerful ATI 500 MHz chip with 10MB of memory built on the chip.

The CPU itself, (actually 3 processors), is a 3.2GHz liquid cooled IBM using 512MB of memory, (shared between the graphics and the CPU).

The more expensive Xbox 360 has a removable 20GB hard drive and both system use a 12x DVD-ROM unit. Up to four controllers can be connected to the machine, all wirelessly, and there are three standard USB 2.0 port too.

As a rule of thumb, what ever you can plug in your Windows XP machine USB port can be plugged into the Xbox 360. That includes MP3 players, (like the iPod), digital cameras and so on.
This makes the Xbox 360 a very powerful tool to add.

How many games are really available?

The Xbox 360 was launched late 2005, (Xbox was discontinued in august that year), and there are well over 200 games available from the previous version.
As mentioned above only the version with the detachable hard-drive allows you to use the previous games created for Xbox.
Otherwise the current Xbox 360 only has about 15 games solely developed for the Xbox 360. But with the Microsoft muscle behind it, game developers are likely to rapidly develop new games for it.