For the North American launch lineup, Microsoft has previously announced that it plans to have 15-20 games ready to be released with the console. Bach said that the company currently has 30 to 35 games that are capable of launching in the fall, but he said that "it's quite possible we'll end up with 10, 12, or 13, and we'll just be ecstatic about that." Additionally, given its region-specific development strategy, particularly considering its Japanese Xbox development studio, the launch lineup in the three primary regions may look very different. "I should also point out that the game portfolio will change quite dramatically by territory," Bach said. "We haven't done the final mapping yet, but it's quite possible that there will be zero overlap between our US portfolio and our Japanese portfolio at launch. There will be somewhat more overlap between North America and Europe, but even then, there will be quite a bit of difference." Microsoft hasn't announced any launch information for the Japanese and European territories at this time, but the fall Tokyo Game Show and ECTS in September will serve as the forums for those announcements.

Microsoft plans to support the Xbox with a $500 million marketing campaign in the first 18 months after the console's launch, but to date it has been hesitant to specifically discuss its marketing strategy. However, Bach made it clear that Microsoft plans on pushing the Xbox brand in particular, rather than the general company name. "One of the secrets to our marketing effort is to build the Xbox brand," Bach said. "Sometimes I get the question from people, 'Gosh, Microsoft is not particularly perceived as a gaming company.' For those who play PC games, they've been pretty happy with the PC games that we do. It doesn't mean game consoles, though, and it doesn't mean gaming per se. So, we're going to use Microsoft as a foundation piece, but really focus on the Xbox brand. So, you'll see a lot of Xbox brand imagery--you see it on our controller, you see it our brochures, you're going to see it all of our marketing. I hope everybody really likes this shade of green, because you're going to see a lot of it over time, and what we want people to do, we want that brand to stand for passion, for exhilaration, for innovation, and for the excitement that you can create in these immersive games. And we want people to say, 'I play Xbox games.' I don't ever expect, nor do we really have a goal for somebody to say, 'I play Microsoft games.'"

In fact, the NV2A is a faster GeForce3 with one major addition to the hardware: a second vertex shader pipeline. Since the chip design was recently finalized for production, Nvidia could confirm that it will run at the faster speed of 250MHz. This puts the pixel fill rate at 1,000 megapixels and the texture fill rate at 2,000 megatexels--much lower than the Microsoft's original official spec of over 4,000 megapixels and 4,000 megatexels, but fill rate isn't the most important spec. Fill rate is not a determining factor because, as a console, the Xbox is naturally destined to run at the low resolution of consumer TVs. Also, most of the Xbox's special capabilities, such as vertex shaders or full-scene antialiasing, occur at different points in the pipeline and are not at all dependent on fill rate. More important is the NV2A's bandwidth to the 64MB of shared memory. The memory in the console is 200MHz double-data rate (DDR) SDRAM, which provides a maximum of 6.4GB per second of throughput to both the CPU and graphics chip. The custom CPU uses up to 1GB per second of this shared bandwidth. This leaves less headroom than the GeForce3 has with its 7.36GB per second bandwidth, but again television's lower display resolution means this should be plenty. The shared memory design also avoids the bottlenecks PC developers see when sending a lot of data from a PC's main memory over the AGP bus to the graphics card.

The Xbox controller, although large, is somewhat more comfortable and attractive than the Dreamcast controller it has generated to comparisons to. The handles are angled outwards, eliminating the need for the user to bend their hands inward, and the controller's size is quite manageable for adult hands. The entire controller had a gem-like feel, with various buttons and the central Xbox logo composed of a transparent, colored plastic. However, the large number of buttons and the common feel of all of them may prove confusing. The X-Box itself is also quite large, especially in comparison to the slim PS2 and the petite Gamecube.

: A Continued Economic Downturn

Although we loathe to admit this, the videogame industry is a luxury industry. No one (except possibly, that wierdguy who works at your local EB) actually needs videogames to survive, and when the economy turns south, the first things that get cut are the non-essentials.
We are currently experiencing a rather steep economic downturn. And although many are predicting that the slump is ready to bottom out, no one knows what will happen for sure. If this downturn continues through the year into the holiday buying season, the Xbox would certainly suffer.

Sony already has already shipped 10 million units in stores and could possibly weather out a global economic slump on this cushion, but the Xbox's chances for success would be hurt badly if the economy continues to decline.

Likelihood:
If Alan Greenspan can't figure out what's up today, we're not even going to take a stab at what might be going on with the economy six months down the line. (However, many experts are predicting things will level out long before then.)

Finally, word has come from the horse's mouth that Metal Gear Solid X, the recently announced Xbox version of the traditionally PlayStation shooter, will not be a port of Metal Gear Solid 2. Speaking at a press conference in Japan, creator of the series Hideo Kojima confirmed that the Microsoft version will in fact be a mix of the original PlayStation game and the stunning sequel. The only way you'll get to play Metal Gear Solid 2 in its entirety will be with a PlayStation 2.

At present, Microsoft denies all rumors that it's planning a handheld system. The company is, in the words of chief Xbox officer Robbie Bach, "focused on one thing and one thing only." That one thing is the Xbox, Microsoft's answer to Sony's PlayStation 2, Sega's Dreamcast and Nintendo's Gamecube (both the Xbox and Gamecube are due to launch in the fall). Continues Mr. Bach, "If I take my eye off the Xbox mission for two seconds, I'll lose. I can think about [portable games] when I have time to think about those things."