Inside scoop on Xbox 360 kiosk rollout details

by Dan Choi { Oct 22nd 2005 at 1:15AM }

Xbox 360 retail kiosk An MS rep (who chooses to remain anonymous) has tipped us off to the rollout plans of the Xbox 360 kiosk in all the major U.S. gaming retailers. Here are the details:

All current Xbox display units in Wal-Mart will be replaced with Xbox 360 kiosks over the next three weeks. (Our previous story confirmed the start of this work during the past week.)
Best Buy kiosks start arriving next week, and installation should be done by the week after.
Target and Toys "R" Us will get inline displays (like the one pictured here), while other stores—including GameStop, EB, and Circuit City—will get either freestanding kiosks ("which look great") or specialty display cabinets.

Finally, all of the display kiosks will use Samsung 23" HDTVs, as noted in the past. So… if you haven't been able to play 360 demos up to this point, you'll probably have a very good chance to do so in the near future.

[Thanks to grap3fruitman for the pic]

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

(JD) XeqtioneR @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Cool! I also got abit of info out of a helpful Walmart employee in Electronics regarding the Nov. 22 release date, and allegedly how many 360's are hitting each walmart for the initial release on the 22nd of Nov.

More info at my site, along with a few new pics: www.XeqtioneR.net

wonderer @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Sweet -- so the Xbox will be pretty much playable EVERYWHERE, in the US at least... any details for the Canadian or Euro folks? Can you ask the guy (or gal)?

BoB @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Man, those Samsung HDTVs are terrible, just terrible. They do not do the games justice. I would never want to play a game or watch TV on one of those things.

vc @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

BoB -- I hear that some of them are configured incorrectly and that some are configured correctly. It seems to depend on who hooked it up and whether they know how to do it.

syco @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Is Kameo playable on this demo?

(JD) XeqtioneR @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

It sure is! I've got a few snap-shots of it up on my site: www.XeqtioneR.net

SickNic @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

I went to a walmart today and played the xbox360. They used a crappy ass screen (not the HD samsungs) so it didn't look as good as I know it will. I played it for 20 minutes though...

Dan Choi @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

"Is Kameo playable on this demo?"

JD (the XeqtioneR) has got it right:
http://users.adelphia.net/~jdortega/2005/10/kameo-for-xbox-360.html

Ryan @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

oNly oNe moNth!!oNe1!!1

Ryan @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

oNly oNe moNth!!oNe1!!1

Rare Hare @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

yeah, i'm pretty excited about november 22, even though i won't have enough money to grab an xbox right away.

still paying off body work on my car.. have 600 bucks left to pay and then i'm done. but when you're a 16 year old with no job that's tough.

Donald @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

can't wait to play it........

barrett @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Soo are the graphics that much better than the first xbox

PhilJ @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Saw one at Best Buy in Apple Valley, MN tonight... though it wasn't hooked up [correctly? on purpose?]. Some customer was desperately fiddling with the input selection on the TV. :)

Saw the kiosk already though at a Walmart, playing CoD. Pretty amazing stuff. With me having no loyalty to any particular mfr, it looked like a really good gaming experience. I'm interested in all of the consoles.

t-kun @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

"amazing stuff"?

A large group of my friends made the drive out to Sun Prairie to check out the first 360 kiosk reported here on Joystiq. The Samsung display was fine, but the games were less than impressive.

Kameo looked like a last gen title, and the controls were terrible.

Call of Duty 2 looked like a current PC game, though it was a lot more fun than Kameo. The only graphically impressive thing I saw was the transparency effects from smoke grenades.

I expected quite a bit more from next-generation graphics. Far and away, the most improved thing was that the games were running on an HD monitor. If I had been playing on a standard TV, like the one I have at home, I would be hardpressed to tell the difference from the original XBox. The $400 + games was a hard enough price to swallow, but now I feel like I'll need to spend another $1000 on a new TV to actually benefit.

Rather than making me want to buy a 360 more, the kiosk actually accomplished the opposite. I'll wait until the 2nd generation of games come out. By then HDTVs may be a little cheaper too.

Darren Tilley @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Just got back from Wal*Mart and here are my findings.

Firstly.. The smaller power brick is actually for the Samsung screen. The HUGE power brick is the Xbox's power supply. It's at least half the size of the system.

Secondly.. Although the Samsung HDTV display was hooked up with the included component cables, it was neither set to widescreen nor High Def. Luckily there was a helpful guy there who let me play with the settings and I was able to get it into Widescreen mode. However no matter how hard I tried, it would not display High Def on the Samsung display. Although the menu was reporting 720p as the current mode, the TV was clearly displaying everything in 480p. I'm not sure what could be wrong. Could it be that the included component cables are not rated for 720p? Or perhaps I missed an option on the TV side of things.

Lastly, this is probably the thing I am most annoyed about. When the system is running in 480p, there are jaggies all over the place! Instead of rendering the games in 720p (or higher) and downsampling to 480p to smooth out the edges, the games seem to just run in 480p natively.. so there's a whole hell of a lot of aliasing. That is unforgivable. People without High Def screens are going to be extremely dissapointed, and it really could look so much better if they had been resampling.

Not a single demo running on the system looked like it couldn't have been running on a standard Xbox. Project Gotham 3 and Gears of War look next gen, so it would have been nice to see those, but they aren't on the demo disk. At least not in playable form.

It's really a sad day for me. I went in postive with high hopes, but now I'm just annoyed. I'll probably still get it, but I'm looking forward to the PS3 so much more now.

Rare Hare @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

"Lastly, this is probably the thing I am most annoyed about. When the system is running in 480p, there are jaggies all over the place! Instead of rendering the games in 720p (or higher) and downsampling to 480p to smooth out the edges, the games seem to just run in 480p natively.. so there's a whole hell of a lot of aliasing. That is unforgivable. People without High Def screens are going to be extremely dissapointed, and it really could look so much better if they had been resampling."

this comment here really upset me. i do not have a hi-def tv, and i doubt i'll be getting one any time soon as i'm not a wealthy person.

i know i could get a low end hi-def set for around 700 dollars, but still.. that's a lost of money to pay extra JUST so i can actually get enjoyment out of my next-gen console.

very dissapointing.

CrAzY American @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Darren Tilley-

Are you talking just to hear yourself talk? Wow the power supply is not "at least as half as big as the system" I was there with Jd Xeqtioner at the walmart and saw it personally. I suppose you don't have any pics like he did to back up your claim the power brick is "half as big as the 360"

BY the way, who the hell cares? people just trying to knock the system. Talk bout something that matters.

I personally don't know what everyone is complaining about. I went to my local walmart and everything looked beautiful. CoD2 looked awsome as did Kameo.

THe controller also feels very comfortable. Only thing that sucks is where the tv is located. Feels like your neck is going to break off.

Darren Tilley @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

CrAzY American: You are being quite rude. I'm not flaming anyone. I'm giving my opinions.

I don't have any photos of the power brick because I don't make a habit of bringing my camera into Wal*Mart. If I go back there, I'll take photos. The guy there was extremely helpful and I really don't think he'd have a problem letting me snap a few shots.

Let me explain further since it obviously didn't sink in the first time. There were two power bricks secured to the back wall in the display. One was small (little bigger than the size of the psp power brick) and had a very thin two-wired cord coming from it. The other was really big (just like the one photographed before) and featured a thick grey rubberized cable (about the thickness of a pencil). I asked which one ran to the xbox and the guy said the big one. I rephrased the quesiton, as I also thought this had already been disproven, but he opened the display and showed me the cord running down towards the Xbox. I tend to beleive him as he was the one who set the display up. He also mentioned that it put out quite a bit of heat. I'm not doubting the possibility that there are different power supplies around, but that seems unlikely to me.

And the comment about it's size? When I say almost half the size, I mean it. It was almost as long as the console, almost as tall, and about half the depth. Almost half the size of the system.

And about something that matters? How about you estimate how many polygons they used on the T-Rex in the King Kong demo. If you want my guess on that, I don't think you have to look much further than the PSone tech demo.

I don't bash systems. I'm very impartial. I call it as I see it. I've developed for Playstation2 and Xbox and I know what they are capable of. If I look at a 360 game and say that I think a current Xbox could run something pretty damn close, I'm stating my (educated) opinion. It might not mean much to a fanboy like yourself. But someone who actually wanted to know how the 480p mode works (about 70% or more of the gaming public won't have High Def) might actually want to hear some people tell the truth once in a while.

Maybe when you finally get to open the 360 your mommy bought you on Christmas morning, you can come back in here and apologize when it doesn't meet up to your obviously already low expectations.

PhilJ @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

t-kun,

Yep, amazing. Better than my PC's version of CoD, even with one of them fancy video cards. But then again, I'm an older guy, and pretty much anything impresses me. Kids these days, so hard to please. ;) Course, I am fortunate enough to have an HDTV, but I agree, had it been on an older TV, it wouldn't have been so good.

With all that action going on, bullets richoeting, sound yelping, guys running around and ducking, and the high level of detail... I know at least more than one PC would've skipped a frame on all that, but with the console, it didn't stutter even a teensy bit. And it's still cheaper than a PC for gaming (except for the "monitor" of course).

WillGonz @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

If you don't have a Hi-Def TV. JUST get the VGA cable. It will allow you to play games using a computer monitor and it will look sweet. The VGA cable is like $39.99.

Pick up the special Offical XBOX Mag. that features everything about the 360. It is a special issue. Has all the cables in it you can buy.

dm intheknow @ Dec 18th 2005 9:37PM

Yes the big brick is for the xbox. Its big and heavy. Slightly bigger, wider, and heavier than your standard laptop transformer. The other power supply that you have been speaking of is not for the tv. Its for the usb hub/control box underneath the console. It powers the unit that resets the system, memory card port, and controllers. The LCD TV does not have a external transformer.