Microsoft announced the launch date for the Xbox 360 in Australia at a press event in Sydney last night. As well as the launch date, announced was the pricing points for the console, being launched on March 2nd 2006.

The console is being offered in two different versions, with the Xbox 360 being sold for an RRP of $649.95, and the Xbox 360 Core system having an RRP of $499.95.

Xbox 360 is the first console that lets gamers enjoy the freedom of wireless gaming, as standard. The Xbox 360 offer will include the console, 20GB hard drive, media remote, wireless controller, component high-definition cable and Ethernet cable. Xbox 360 Core System delivers the same powerful gaming as Xbox 360, but starts with the basics and lets you expand at your own pace. The Xbox Core system includes the console, composite AV cable and wired controller.

Wireless (RRP*$79.95) and wired (RRP*$59.95) controllers
· Play charge cable (RRP*$34.95)
· Rechargeable battery pack and cradle (RRP*$49.95)
· Battery pack (RRP*$19.95)
· 20Gb hard drive (RRP*$169.95)
· 64MB Memory unit (RRP*$49.95)
· Wireless networking adaptor(RRP*$169.95)

· VGA cable (RRP*$49.95)
· Advanced AV pack (RRP*$39.95)
· High Definition AV pack (RRP*$49.95)
· Headset (RRP*$49.95)
· Faceplate (RRP*$29.95)
· Universal Media Remote (RRP*$49.95)

Microsoft have advised that a list of launch titles will be available early next year.

f***, seems like next-gen gaming is going to be expensive. Looks as though I'll have to go halves with the girlfriend =]

Four months after the US....gawd we really are a backwater.

The price is a bit of a turn off, but there is no way around it. (short of buying one of the back of a truck)
I pity the people in the US with dodgy systems though. They will have to wait for ever for a replacement, and by the time they get one, they will have some better deal going than what was at launch.

last edited by Ayuen at 12:37:09 23/Nov/05

The price is pretty decent for a launch price, on par with what the XBox launched for and cheaper than what the PS2 launched for.

I still dont get who exactly they're marketing the Core system at though, I mean, who the hell would buy that? Sure, its a bit cheaper up front, but after you buy a hard drive and some wireless controllers you would have been better going Premium from the start.

aimed at parents buying something for younger kids perhaps?

· Advanced AV pack (RRP*$39.95)
· High Definition AV pack (RRP*$49.95)



wtf australia getting ripped again??

the US cable has both composite and component cables in the box with optical audio output and hdtv switch on it, yet we have to pay more for these cables. f*** buying it here, prolly cheaper to import.

For a launch price it is VERY decent, but the chances of me getting that much money together for launch is slim to nil. As for the core system, I would say it would be aimed at the tards and bogans who come into places like k-mart and say "Could I have one one those Xbox thingies. Not the old one. The new one."
They need something to spend their centerlink payment on... cause they don't seem to want shoes or deoderant.

20Gb hard drive (RRP*$169.95)
64MB Memory unit (RRP*$49.95)

OMG!!

That's daylight robbery if I've ever seen it. Why do they charge so much for a piss-ant 64MB memory card, it should be no more than $20 max. And the HDD? WTF??

Memory cards have always been around that price, even when they were only 1 or 2mb or 8mb, dunno why, maybe its more expensive to manufacture them? Or maybe its just because they know people are used to paying that for memory cards and will pay it anyway? But yeah, they have limited use when you've got a hard drive I guess, except maybe for taking savegames and whatever to a friend's place.

the chances of me getting that much money together for launch is slim to nil

I feel your pain :( My only hope of getting my hands on a 360 is convincing my brother to get one (which I think he intends to do anyway).

last edited by Khel at 13:32:01 23/Nov/05

not that im an avid enough console gamer to purchase a console at launch, but 4 months is a joke, what are they thinking? in this day and age a global launch should be a possibility, at most a few weeks or a month.. when does it come out in europe? if we are equal with europe that is poor form for the euro market, if we are lagged behind europe, then thats just disrespectful to us..

none of the games look next-gen anyhow, novelty.. i'll probably wait until the 360 goes the way of the dreamcast once ps3 hits to buy one, if ya know what i mean... cough..

Europe gets it early December afaik. 10th? 12th? Something like that.

none of the games look next-gen anyhow

Yeah, you're right, Oblivion looks s***, nothing special there. And PGR3, 100,000+ polys per car, hopeless. And Gears of War, man, Unreal 3 engine, that s***s looking dated, you'd think they'd use something a bit more modern for it.

I think I'll wait for the PS3 as well, I've always wanted a DVD player shaped like a George Foreman grill that can play really, really pretty pre-rendered movies. It'll go well with my rootkit infected PC.

Are you sure you wont have to pay per DVD viewing with the PS3, perhaps a small percentage for every revolution of a DVD? Surly Sony are looking at these possibilitiese!

And don't forget the banana joy pad to go with your George Foreman grill

i'll probably wait until the 360 goes the way of the dreamcast once ps3 hits to buy one

Way of the Dreamcast, hey? I think you'll be waiting a while then...

Didnt the dreamcast die through lack of advertising? If so I doubt micro$oft will even be capable of not advertising.

i was implying once it is all hacked up -- ala the dreamcast, making it a pirates dream, arrgh me mateys... so i can wifi-stream my legit backup dvd movies to my home theatre of course...

its obviously a capable system with a good grounding in online play and microsofts' deep pockets will obviously never let it fail, but there are more than a few comparisons with the dreamcast to be drawn.. not that its all that bad, dreamcast is still one of my favourite systems ever..

http://www.1up.com/do/feature?cId=3145154

also the games looking not next-gen comment -- the only game i've seen that has REALLY impressed me as something offering close to what i would expect under the term "next-gen" over current generation games is NBA2k6..

none of the release games look to be pushing the system that far, or are what i'd consider a killer-app.. they're also not well and truly above what can be achieved with current pc games.. more than a few of the launch titles are actually current gen pc games and look worse..

only a fanboy would dispute that,

Sigh i paid $700 for my ps2 (Version 4) and that was about year after launch, i think $495 is great for the core system, you can allways buy the extra bits latter on, considering the Xbox 360 has a equivalent of a $700 graphics card in terms of gpu, not to metion the cpu...surley they are running on a loss on these units and will make it up in game sales?


last edited by 0z at 21:54:41 23/Nov/05

oz thats the standard setup.

make a loss on console, make a killing on games.

when i worked at EB, especially when target would drop their price and we had to price match, wed lose up to 100 bucks on the Xbox console, and you generally tried to sell 2-3 games to make up for it

Seems like it's time to import. Well... once the US actually has enough to start selling them to anyone.

Memory cards have always been around that price, even when they were only 1 or 2mb or 8mb, dunno why, maybe its more expensive to manufacture them?

haha, I doubt "cost to make" and "price they sell for" is relative. It is because people will pay that, no other reason.

Yeah but how many people actually bought a memory card for the Xbox? The only purpose for them was to transfer saved games between machines because of the hard drive. The PS2 however I have like 3 memory cards. Bastards.

memory cards are always going to stay the same price, its just as technology increases, so will the space.

Check out the most authoritative list of reasons to buy the Xbox 360 if you're a clueless, media-hyped "gamer" with no experience with the industry at all. Check out this gem:

The best thing about the Xbox 360's early launch is that it's a good investment now that will pay off later with greater profits. If you buy it now, you'll earn a reputation online and build your achievements list out, gaining traction ahead of your slow-ass PS3 friends.

A headstart on building my e-Reputation? How could I lose?

That whole article was written as a rebuttle to this far stupider article champ.

Some people don't deserve money:

http://www.xbox-scene.com/xbox1data/sep/EEFkyluApkqqsVUkVu.php

f***ing hell, they used donated money to f*** up an XBox 360? I wonder who donted the money...

I cbf looking for the answer because I won't be buying an xbox but does it conform to that new standard thing windows vista will with the HD crap? That thing where you need to have some brand new HD monitor or else if you try to watch HD content it'll downsample it to "far less than HD quality"? If so will buyers need a brand new compliant tv just to watch HD s*** on the xbox (games dvd's whatever)

Um if the xbox didnt conform to this "new standard thing" then it wouldnt play hdcp stuff at all would it?

And HDCP is for movies, its like macrovision on dvd players.

been there. Played project gothem. yarned and moved on

Autolux are you a Sony fanboy by chance?
If so then you'll know that they'll be launching in 07 and will therefore have no new consoles for around 2 years at least.

Sif wait that long!

You yarned? Did you sit in the rocking chair on your porch and whittle toy soldiers out of wood while you did it?

lol. It sorta went like that. Walked up to it. Shook its hand. Had a couple of laps. The graphics arnt that goood you realise. Its not really `Next generation` thats just a load of crock. The graphics are the best yet, yes, But not like `out of this world` as some make it out to be.

I think the point we're all missing here is THE LAUNCH TITLE LINEUP IS BALLS AND COCKS. If this is any insight into the console's software library's immediate future then whythef***bother?

I'm interested in Perfect Dark and Kameo....I would probably buy it for that.

perfect dark would be good if it was made by the same people who made the 64 version.

also wasnt PS1 above the $900 mark on launch?

lol. It sorta went like that. Walked up to it. Shook its hand. Had a couple of laps. The graphics arnt that goood you realise. Its not really `Next generation` thats just a load of crock. The graphics are the best yet, yes, But not like `out of this world` as some make it out to be.

did you play it on a HDTV? where abouts did you play it?

last edited by SASR at 12:49:50 24/Nov/05

I think the point we're all missing here is THE LAUNCH TITLE LINEUP IS BALLS AND COCKS.

Is PGR3 a launch title? Cos thats a definate must get, and I'd prolly get Oblivion as well cos no doubt the 360 would make it look prettier than my PC could (but I dont think Oblivion comes out till March). Gears of War is one I'd definately pick up and of course, Top Spin 2.

I've got no idea which (if any) of those are actually in the launch lineup though, but what console has launched in the last 5 or 6 years and not had a s***ty launch lineup? Its like a tradition or something. The DC at least had Sonic and Soul Calibur at launch, but not much else for a while. Apart from Dynasty Warriors and DOA3 I had trouble even finding anything worth buying for my PS2 until a few months after launch. And I can't really remember the Gamecube launch, because I didn't bother getting one till RE came out, but from memory it had f*** all available for it as well.

wifi-stream my legit backup dvd movies to my home theatre of course...

backing up dvd's involves by-passing copy protection witch is, since the free trade agreement witht he U.S., illegal.
therefore you can not legally stream those "back up's"

yeh thanks dude, thats my first concern when i'm implying that i'll be waiting for modchips to buy this machine..

I went to this Xbox launch thing in Sydney; been meaning to write something up about it but haven't had time. Here are some quick comments:

- Three games were shown, PGR3, Perfect Dark Zero, and Kameo. To be brutally honest, none of these blew me away visually. Being a PC gamer I'm used to high resolution and bad ass graphics; to see it on a console doesn't impress me that much. I don't know if its just that I'm too used to whizbang graphics on the PC, or if its just that the titles that were shown don't truly demonstrate the visual capabilities of the 360.

- PGR3 was good fun, though I thought the car models just had too much of that glossy plastic feel that you get with ridiculously high poly models, high res textures and specular highlighting. Great feel to the cars. The MS dudes also mentioned there would be "PGR TV", which is basically like QuakeTV/HLTV/ETTV - all those TV things PC gamers have had for years in games good enough to support them. So, when there are bigass races on between all the leet players, you'll be able to jump on Xbox Live and spectator them yourself.

- Kameo looks cool in a Zelda sort of way. Not my sort of game but great environments, colours, visuals, etc.

- Perfect Dark Zero looks like a totally action-based FPS game, not a real tacshooter type thing. Has an interesting combo of third person/FPS which I've always wanted to see in an FPS (ie, when you're going up/down ladders, camera switches to third person). Now I've seen it, I've decided i don't like it.

- Xbox 360 has lots of cool features, like wireless, ability to plug in a USB drive with mp3s on it and have it become the soundtrack to whatever game you're playing, etc. It is supposed to integrate with all your existing stuff, like Media Centre/XP PCs for video streaming, iPod/PSP for media management, etc. If the only reason you have an Xbox is to have it modded for media stuff, then I'm not sure what advantages an Xbox 360 is going to give you, other than games (at least, until it can be modded :)

- I was blown away when I found out we'd have to wait until March to get it. Sure, Australia is a tiny little market, but 3 months is a bit of a long haul.

did you play it on a HDTV? where abouts did you play it?

I played it in a shopping centre here in japan. Played it on a Pioneer 50-inch HDTV Plasma Display. As I said. Its not that great. It`s good graphics and all. But I think your getting your hopes up. It`s not `out of this world`. I really don`t know why they call it a next gen console.

The controllers are awsome though.


Custom ATI Graphics Processor
• 500MHz processor
• 10 MB of embedded DRAM
• 48-way parallel floating-point dynamically scheduled shader pipelines
• Unified shader architecture


Nuff said.

I still dont get the point you're trying to make...