Microsoft Xbox 360 Arcade Review

The Xbox 360 was one of the top gifts of the holiday season back in 2006 and could be again this year. Microsoft's new Xbox 360 Arcade ($199.99 list) is a stripped-down version of the game console that hits the pricing sweet spot that consumers are looking for in a dismal economy. Unlike the other two consoles in the Xbox 360 line, the Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Elite, the Arcade ships without a headset, a network cable, or a hard drive. This lack of hardware limits game-play options, but the Arcade is a outstanding media center once you install Microsoft's New Xbox Experience (NXE) OS.

Microsoft didn't stray very far from its original design with the Xbox Arcade (12 by 3 by 10 inches, HWD). In fact, except that its profile is thinner because it lacks a hard drive, it looks almost exactly the same as any other white Xbox 360. (The Elite is the only Xbox with a black finish.) On the front panel you will find a large on/off button, an IR receiver, a loading tray for DVDs and games, and two slots for memory cards. On the back of the console you will find USB, HDMI, and Ethernet ports. The Arcade ships with a wireless controller and a 512MB memory card but not much else; you basically get just enough to get started. It does come, however, with five Xbox Live Arcade games (Pac-Man, UNO, Luxor 2, Boom Boom Rocket, and Feeding Frenzy) so you can play something immediately.

Internally, the Xbox Arcade is not much different from its predecessors. The Arcade features the same triple-core 3.2-GHz, 95nm IBM CPU as the other Xbox 360s—at least that's the official Microsoft line. It's a poorly kept secret that Microsoft has been updating its new Xboxes with a new 65nm chip, but the company's representatives will not comment on this. And I don't blame them. They have thousands of consoles on the market and don't want to get stuck with a glut of older SKUs. Sony introduced its smaller, more energy-efficient 65nm processor with the launch of the 40GB PS3. Both the PS3 and the 360 processors, new and old, blow the Nintendo Wii's 729-MHz chip right out of the water. Then again, if you buy a Wii you are probably looking for a different gaming experience. —next: Storage Shortage

Storage Shortage

Storage Shortage

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The main difference between the Arcade and other Xbox 360s is the Arcade's lack of storage. Microsoft managed to shave a lot of money off the price by ditching the hard drive. Unfortunately, this also makes gaming more difficult. The Arcade comes with 256MB of internal memory, and a 512MB memory card ($49.99 direct). Once I got the Arcade online (no Ethernet cable was included), the first thing I did was download the Xbox's NXE operating system. This download alone was over 100MB, so from the get-go the paltry amount of initial storage was getting filled up. Then I downloaded one of the new Xbox Community Games, a cool Tetris-like game dubbed Duotris, and one Xbox LIVE game, the pirate-themed Age of Booty (trial version). Just like that, almost all of my storage was wiped out!

The Xbox LIVE Marketplace is an amazing online portal where you can download hundreds of games and movies, but not with the Xbox Arcade's out-of-the-box configuration. For example, a download of the 108-minute movie Happy Feet in standard definition (480p) occupies 1.2GB of hard drive space, and the HD (720p) version consumes 5GB. Similarly, a 22-minute South Park episode takes up 252MB of storage in SD, and the HD version takes nearly a gig (1,008MB) of space. Clearly, to get the most out of this box, you will need a hard drive.

Microsoft sells hard drives for the Xbox separately, and the cheapest option is the Xbox 360 60GB Starter Pack, which includes an Xbox LIVE Gold Membership, a headset for online communications, and a 60GB hard drive for $99.99 (list). Suddenly all the money you saved buying the Arcade is gone and you wonder why you didn't just get the core Xbox 360 version ($299.99 list), which comes with all of those things, to begin with. Hooking up your own external USB hard drives to the 360 will work, but only up to a point. You can play music and view photos and some videos from your own hard drive on the Arcade, but you won't be able to save game progress or load Xbox LIVE Marketplace content to it.

NXE offers another solution to the storage problem, at least for Netflix subscribers: streaming video. If you log on to Netflix.com and add a movie to your "Instant Movie" queue, it will show up under the Netflix heading on your Xbox LIVE menu. It's pretty seamless, and the movies show up just minutes after you add them online. —next: Game Play

Game Play

Game Play

In addition to the two downloaded games I mentioned, I also put the Arcade through its paces with two of the hottest games on the market right now: Gears of War 2 and Fable 2. The console had no problems with these two graphics-intensive games. Even without a hard drive, the Xbox 360 Arcade can keep pace with the PS3 and blows away the Wii in terms of graphics power.

Despite its low price, the Arcade has the same custom ATI graphics processing and 512MB of GDDR3 system memory as the other members of the Xbox line. I wasn't able to play games in full 1080i resolution because the console doesn't ship with an HDMI cable, but if you have one I'd suggest using it instead of the A/V cable that comes in the box. I also discovered that the Arcade, unlike the Xbox 360 and the Xbox 360 Elite, won't play first-generation Xbox titles.

One of the cool features of NXE is its ability to upload DVD-based games to your hard drive. Wait, before you start throwing away all of those lime-green Xbox 360 game boxes, let me say that you will still need the discs to play the games. So what's the advantage of uploading? You can cut down the delays that come when the 360 has to load game data from the disc by 30 to 50 percent. (Also, because the disc is not spinning as much, the whole experience will be, according to Microsoft, about 7 decibels quieter.) This doesn't sound like a big time savings, but as Xbox veterans know, these delays really start to add up during a marathon gaming session. Of course, without additional storage, you simply can't get this functionality with the Xbox Arcade.

One of the best things about the Xbox line of products is the console's ability to act as a Windows Media Extender as well as a gaming console. This is still true with the Xbox Arcade. It took about 5 minutes to add the console to my network and begin to stream videos, photos, and music to my television from my PC. I've been pretty harsh on the Arcade's lack of storage in this review, but if you store all of your videos on your PC you might not need as much. I was able to watch WMV and MPEG files, but couldn't get any DIVX files to play. I was also able to set up a slideshow with music and transitions between the photos.

The Xbox 360 Arcade is an affordable, enjoyable game console, but before you run out to buy one, take a close look at the core Xbox 360 package. It is $100 more, but you will get a lot more out of NXE if you spring for the hard drive up front. If you just want a cheap, casual gaming platform for the kids to play, the Wii is probably a better bet.