Xbox One; One direction, and it's the wrong one.

So, 'Xbox One', then?

Microsoft's focus seems to have shifted away from games with the Xbox One and onto all encompassing entertainment, with any form of real time gameplay being disappointingly absent from yesterday's presentation. True, E3 is just a few short weeks away, and with it the inevitable Gears of War, Halo and Fable et al announcements, but the only positive thing shown from a gaming point of view was the new controller, which although in a familiar form factor, looks absolutely gorgeous. The same can't be said for the console itself however, which serves as little more than fat, ugly confirmation of the machine's set top box ambitions. 

I think the problem with the new Xbox's multi-faceted entertainment approach for us here in the UK is that a lot of the content on offer stateside will either never materialise over here or be hidden behind a paywall when it does. The vast majority of subscription TV here is provided by either Sky or Virgin Media, who see fit to furnish customers with their own set top boxes that serve their purpose just fine. Plugging your TV box's HDMI output into the Xbox One's HDMI input will allow you to overlay its interface on top of Sky or Virgin's, but I very much doubt the Xbox One will offer full interaction with either, having been designed with US cable TV providers in mind. Pressing the source button on your remote to switch between TV and console really isn't that labour intensive, certainly no more so than giving a verbal command to the same end, as was demonstrated onstage.

What little talk there was of games was very disappointing  I was absolutely indifferent to EA Sports's talk of a strategic partnership with Microsoft and the Forza announcement as I don't care for sport games, and despite being a Halo fan, was left unmoved by talk of a new live action Halo TV series. Call of Duty looked nice, but that'll be on PS4/PC also, and the generic Infamous-clone that's name I can't even recall's trailer also failed to excite me. Specifications where only touched on, pretty much confirming the rumoured technological inferiority to the PS4. Tellingly, Microsoft listed the system as packing 8GB of RAM, but didn't specify if it was run of the mill DDR3 or the superfast DDR5 used in the next Playstation, although again, the withholding of such information pretty much confirms the former eventuality. There was vague talk of offloading computational tasks to the cloud as a way to mitigate future performance issues, but I'd take that as no more than hot air until proven otherwise. Also, it seems that Microsoft is set to persevere with their agenda of forcing Kinect onto Xbox users, as each Xbox One' comes with one of the updated Kinect 2.0 sensors, and full use of the console is likely to be difficult or impossible without it. I'm pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of a Blu-Ray drive, though.

I don't think there's much Microsoft can do to persuade me to buy an Xbox One now. Sure, something Halo-related is bound to be announced and pique my interest a little, but after 7 years of owning an Xbox 360 I'm tired of Microsoft's go-to franchises and turned off by the idea of a console on which games don't always take centre stage. I think I'll be looking to jump ship and hop into bed with Sony this time around. To be fair, though, they me as soon as Blizzard took the stage back at the Playstation Meeting in April.