While serving as a gaming platform and portal to Xbox Live, the 360 has proved itself on several occasions as an extremely capable media center. Sure, playing games is awesome, but when your girlfriend is going to actually want to sit back, you can easily bear in mind that the system plays DVDs too. Not that it’s easy to forget or anything like that, but remember when the original Xbox premiered and the only way to use it as a DVD player was by purchasing a special add-on for the console? If there is one thing I’m glad Microsoft didn’t carry over in their mentality towards the 360, trust me, it’s that. On the other hand, if you have a connection that is fast enough for Live, you can stream Netflix to your system. While I lament that you have to be a gold member to do so in concert with having a Netflix account, I would be lying if I said that the two didn’t work fantastically together and were worth the price in my opinion. But perhaps the coolest ‘media feature’ of the 360 in my book, which will keep it on my shelf for years to come is the ability to stream content from a media server. In fact, by simply having a computer equipped with PlayOn software, the 360 can be enable through a home network to stream video from Hulu, Youtube, CBS, and just about any other video content provider you can think of. Personally, that is sometimes cooler than being able to play games if not for the ability to crash on the couch and watch a bad movie on a Saturday afternoon.
Finally, it will doubtlessly be the substantial library of video games as well as noteworthy franchises that continue to keep the console in the top tier of hardware. While I’m not prone to wild speculation, Gears of War 3 will without a doubt see itself coming to the Xbox 360 before 2011. Additionally, 360 owners who care about the Halo franchise, and if Halo Waypoint is any indication there are a lot of you, will definitely stick around when Halo: Reach falls into our laps before the end of the year. Moreover, I feel it necessary to remind everyone of franchises like Mass Effect, which is just now releasing the sequel to the original, essentially leaving room for a third either on the 360 or the next Microsoft console. Finally, there is Fable III, which has unequivocally secured its place as a Microsoft franchise and will seemingly appear this year with support for Natal upon release. This also doesn’t take into account the plethora of multiplatform games that Microsoft consistently pursues exclusive DLC to, if not ensuring they see whatever additional content released for a title is seen on the 360 before the Playstation 3.
Overall though, the 360 consistently proves that it’s library of games is what adapts the most to continually appease loyal fanbases, while conversely attempting to show them consistently fresh content. Therefore, it can easily be seen that as the Xbox 360 offers an almost innumerable amount of contents and ways to be utilized, it becomes clear that for the time being, the system may very well be future-proof. While it is always best to continue changing and adapting to overcome the presented competition and give gamers the best experiences possible, this doesn’t necessarily mean a new console is necessary at this time. Microsoft has seamlessly made it easy enough for gamers to turn on their consoles or put a game into the system and painlessly receive an update to bring the game up to its most modern incarnation. Sure a few fixes are needed every so often to cure the ills of a glitch or two, but overall, by using system and title updates, it presents Microsoft with the divine flexibility to choose when they are going to release a new console if for no other reason than they are not in a rush to push the 360 out of the limelight quite yet.
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