thoughts on Natal and 360 slim

Was pretty much what I expected in terms of games, all pretty cartoonish with the exception of the one demo they showed of Forza for Natal.   So that leaves a glimmer of hope that we may see some real HD games at some point.   Some of the stuff they showed even though they were cartoonish looked pretty fun, I can really see this taking off in the exercise genre. The Kenect will need a powersupply to run on current xboxes but the new xbox slim has power built in for it hence the 'kenect ready' tag.  Sounds like a bundle coming for holiday with the Slim and Kenect.

No pricing announced so they probably haven't figured that out yet.  It will launch Nov 2nd or something.   I did like some of the interface stuff for controlling movies and music and what not, seemed cool voice control is sweet too though that's never really taken off on PCs and has been available for decades.

The new Slim looks really night, it's very sleek.  It'll hit retail this week for 299, the current elite goes down to 249 and the current arcade to 149.  250 gb hard drive is hidden behind a trap door and slides into the console.  Also wifi N is killer.  Everyone who was at the media briefing got a Slim for free, bitches.    It's suppose to be 'whisper' quiet and by the looks of how the HDD connects and stuff, id's guess that this is a totally redesigned system with a single CPU/GPU combo chip for cooling.

Hats off to Spike TV and GTTV for full HD streaming of the press conference.  I watched it on my home theater PC in full 60 inches and felt like I was there, probably had a better view than anyone in the audience for that matter.  Bandwidth dropped a couple times but overall it was awesome.