Gaming
Games
Fixed that for you: Xbox 360
The Xbox 360 is nearly 10, but there’s plenty of life in it yet – here’s how it can go out in style
Fixed that for you: Xbox 360
© Microsoft
Microsoft entered the console fray with its gargantuan first generation Xbox back in 2001, taking on the likes of Nintendo’s punchy GameCube and Sony’s dominating PlayStation 2, but it wasn’t until 2005 when the Redmond giants launched the Xbox 360 that it captured the gaming world with its unlockable achievements and high-def graphics.
It fine tuned many of the ideas that the original Xbox gave us, such as cross-game chat with your friends, its own social network tailored for gaming, downloadable online exclusives and easily one of the most defining controllers of any console generation. Sure, the Xbox One is now here, but there’s still plenty of life in the Xbox 360 yet – and how’s here’s how we’d fix it up to remain king of last-gen for at least a few more years yet.
That D-pad
Xbox controller with transforming D-Pad
© Dani Armengol Garreta/Flickr
For all that Microsoft got right with the Xbox 360 controller, such as its ergonomics, triggers and analogue sticks, what’s still an abomination to this day is its D-pad. For the die-hard Street Fighter and Injustice fans, it simply fails: It’s mushy, it’s the complete opposite of accurate and simply needs fixing, making even pulling off the most basic Hadouken a lesson in pain. Microsoft did launch a revamped controller with a superior transforming D-pad (seen above), but we’re puzzled as to why that hasn’t been made the de-facto, standard controller packed in with every console. Make it happen, Microsoft, and save our thumbs.
Make the friends list bigger
The Xbox One arrived with one feature for the particularly affable: souped-up friends lists that let you have more than 100 of your pals added, but we’re puzzled as to why there’s a limitation on the Xbox 360. Did Microsoft think we’d not be able to make friends 10 years ago? There’s a good chance this is a limitation Microsoft can never fix on the 360 due to Live running on the original Xbox Live architecture, but it’s still a puzzling one, and we’d love to see some form of workaround. Still, with a cap of 1000 friends on Xbox One, what happens if we ever hit that limit?
Dashboard customisability
Xbox 360 dashboard
© Microsoft
The trusty dashboard has been through many and various designs, each varying in degree of usability, but all of them still lacking in customisability. Sure you can buy or download a theme to dress up your dashboard a bit more, but we’d love to be able to rearrange where some tiles lie, add some custom options from our own computer and make pins even better for our recent games, apps and websites. Even being able to sort things into folders would be great – and that’s something the PS3 has been able to do for ages.
External hard drive support
If you’ve run out of space on your trusty 320GB hard drive, you’ve likely had to resort to a multitude of USB sticks to hold some other videos, files and demos, but you can only plug in sticks up to 32GB. For many, that’s just not enough – which is why we’d love to see the Xbox 360 gain some form of external hard drive support. Adding your own drive would be much more cost effective than shelling out for Microsoft’s own hard drives, and with a portable external drive, you could cart what you need to your friend’s place too.
Give the gift of games to friends
If you’ve ever wanted to gift a digital download game to a friend of yours, you’re out of luck. Say you’ve had an Arcade game on your console you haven’t touched in years, but your friend wants to play it, can you pass it over to them? Nope. Which is why we’d love for Microsoft to add this feature to the 360, letting you share classics with your friends. Microsoft pulled a u-turn on this for the Xbox One, but we’d love to see it make a comeback – and on 360 too.
Xbox One-style Kinect improvements
Microsoft planned to boost the Xbox 360 with the launch of the stand-alone Kinect in 2010, and while it succeeded in becoming the fastest selling electronic device ever at the time thanks to eight million units sold in its first 60 days, its usefulness is waning. What we’d love to see is more integration added into it aside from just using it for Netflix or swiping through the dashboard. Even telling your Xbox 360 to turn off takes more effort than what’s needed, having to yell out three different commands to switch it off. Even if we can’t get more Xbox One-style upgrades onto the older system, at least let us tell it to turn off with one word.
Cross-platform chat
It’s all good seeing those on your friends list playing happily on their Xbox Ones, but what if you wanted to chat with them? It doesn’t look like it’s technically possible, but we’re sure Microsoft could come up with some workaround to let us talk trash with our buddies, and we know you’d love for that to happen.
Games for Gold is good, but it could be better
Microsoft’s take on delivering you free games for your Xbox Live Gold membership is off to a good start, but it’s still lagging behind Sony’s massive Instant Game Collection for PlayStation Plus members. There are plenty of great games being dished out, but we’d love to see the number increased, giving us even more choice for what we want to play. For the cost of an Xbox Live Gold membership, you’d surely expect there to be even more games available – especially as almost all of of the streaming services have now been made free.
Make Xbox Live free
For PlayStation 3 and PC fans, Xbox Live has always felt like a bit of a shakedown. You have to pay extra for multiplayer? You used to have to pay extra for Netflix which you have to pay extra for as well anyway? Guys, come on. We get that consoles aren’t actually all that profitable a business, and Microsoft’s got to make ends meet, but still, charging for these features when the Xbox One is out and selling well with a much better fleshed out subscription service just seems miserly. Open up Xbox Live on 360 for everyone for the little time left it has under our tellies – or y’know, give us even more incentive to keep that subscription going.
What would you change about the Xbox 360? Let’s hear your thoughts in the comments below...
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