On one hand, I’m glad that initial reports are fairly optimistic that the Xbox 360 is doing better than the original Xbox in Japan (not really a big achievement, to be fair), but on the other hand that doesn’t mean that it isn’t already showing the first signs of bombing over there and I’m sure the many westerners who can’t get them must be mightily pissed off that Microsoft are still flogging the dead horse that is the Japanese market when there are people here willing to pay far over the odds for them.

The Japanese gaming market is in recession, they have little enthusiasm for western games, and committing so many resources to trying to make it succeed there is pure folly. They should definitely release it in Japan, but keep the “worldwide” launch to the parts of the world where people are likely to buy it, like Australia where they’re having to wait until March, or here where nobody can buy them because there aren’t any on the shelf. Meanwhile 60-70% (depends on who you ask) of Japan’s stock is still sitting unsold and not likely to in the near future.

I promised that I’d try to write something more positive and, unsurprisingly, it’s turned out to be something else about the Xbox 360. I’ve loved Xbox Live ever since I started my account during the European beta and really think that Sony’s insistence on not creating a unified online architecture is a mistake, and the more I play with Live on the 360 the more convinced I become that this sort of thing is the future of the gaming community, even at £40/year.

While the specs war will likely go on for years, even after both machines are released, this is Microsoft’s trump card. With the Xbox we saw the start of it – a friends list that follows you across games, voice chat, text and voice messages, and the Live Arcade, but with the 360 they’ve been given the opportunity to put it in at the console level, make much of it available without a subscription (though you want one to play games), and not just to take Xbox Live and run with it, but to bundle it into the boot of a car and drive it for miles. Live is possibly the one area where I haven’t heard any criticisms of the 360, beyond the occasional hysterical privacy scare (“Oh no! People know that I’m looking at pictures! And I can’t be bothered to turn it off!”).

The achievements are a great addition that are getting good feedback. They give you an incentive to play beyond simply finishing the game (why else would I spend 40 minutes of my life trying to reach level 50 on Hexic HD?), give even offline games a new competitive edge as you look at how far your friends have gone, and has even rumbled a few people on forums who claim to be amazing and games and burn their way through everything. I just hope that Microsoft’s control over third-party accessories will stop the Action Replay/Gameshark from coming along and ruining it all.

Finally, making the friends list and the related alerts spread and made uniform across all games and the Dashboard makes playing with friends even easier. For the last few nights me and a handful of friends have been playing a couple of hours of PGR3 together every night by just using batch text messages and then inviting everyone into a couple of hours of lag-free races and cheating accusations flying around the voice chat. Great stuff.

My one complaint? The 360 headset doesn’t fit my big head and if I use my comfortable Halo 2 headset I can’t mute myself and have no volume controls. Any chance of an adaptor?

I’ve been watching the first teaser for X-Men 3 over on the Apple site and it looks quite good. How well the thing works without Bryan Singer (he’s working on Superman Returns instead) remains to be seen, but all the good characters are returning and anyone who knows anything about the comic storyline will understand the cool Phoenix storyline that we have to look forward to so it bodes well. The thing that really makes me laugh is Kelsey Grammer as Beast which, although very cool because he definitely has the personality down, just looks like someone took Frasier and painted him blue.

Still, I’m sure it’ll get some CGI augmentation and I’m intrigued to see Vinnie Jones as the gigantic Juggernaut. I just hope this one can stand up to the high standards that Singer set with X-Men 2.

I actually meant to comment on this a little while ago but completely forgot, so I suppose there’s no time like the present. For those who don’t know, he apparently said that games aren’t art, and after presumably receiving copious amounts of hate mail, responded on his Answer Man column (third question down). Responses to his response have ranged from the predictable indignant “j00 sux0r” to Edge calibre missives on the subject.

Unusually for someone who cares so much about this industry, I actually hate the whole “are games art?” debate because I don’t think that they should need whatever kind of validation that art status gives. I like to play games and I like to talk about games, and I don’t give a shit if that’s more or less of a worthy pursuit than arthouse cinema or a trip to the Tate Modern.

For the vast majority of people culture or art means stopping for five seconds on BBC Four on the way to watch Celebrity Circle Jerk, so at least games engage the brain and develop coordination instead just vegetating in front of a television. It’s another of my pet hates that people who spend five hours a day, every day, watching the crap on TV can look at me like I’m a maniac when I say that I finished a 12-hour game in a few days, but that’s another rant.

In his case he says that games aren’t art because the interactive side means that they give up a certain “authorial control”, and so can’t have the structural artistry of a well-paced film, a carefully constructed painting, or a great piece of music. Does this mean that jazz isn’t art, since although it’s performed by an artist it’s not in a defined structure? What about painting done by random brushstrokes? Anyone could do that, but what makes it art? Few would argue if you were to call Pride & Prejudice art, but that’s ultimately just a story – most games have a set narrative, so couldn’t they be art in that respect?

What about games like Electroplankton which are designed as free-form interactive art? Or something like Shadow of the Colossus, which takes a fixed narrative and a beautiful setting, not to mention a cinematic ending (can parts of it be art but not all of it?), but commits the cardinal sin of letting you interact with it?

My point is just that art isn’t so simple to define that you can throw a whole medium out the window and declare that it’s not art. “Art” is just the application of creativity, and if you don’t think that the creation of great games requires immense amounts of both skill and creativity you clearly haven’t been playing the right games.

I’ve just seen Penny Arcade’s latest strip which really struck a chord with me. Having already been told off for discussing the ending of King Kong openly with someone without the thought even entering my mind that there’s anybody on the planet that didn’t know what happens (let’s face it – it’s up there with Star Wars and Planet of the Apes as one of the most widely discussed endings ever committed to film), but I still wonder how people can avoid these things.

The last one that did it for me was Lord of the Rings, where I got pissed with having to continually black out anything that said that Gollum bites off Frodo’s finger and falls into Mount Doom with the Ring, that Frodo goes off with the elves, or that Arwen ends up with Aragorn, and the list goes on. It’s not like we’re talking about new material with those movies – this is a book published in 1954 that’s the second most widely read book of the 20th Century behind the Bible.

I needed to rant on that little pet hate of mine after PA went and put it into comic form. Jesus dies at the end of The Passion of the Christ, Anakin gets burnt alive and becomes Darth Vader, and if you haven’t read an old book or seen an old film it makes sense not to go into forum threads discussing the ending. Use some common sense, please.

I don’t know what’s with all my negativity today. I’ll have to balance it out with more 360 evangelisation or something.