First Xbox One launch phase to begin tomorrow

The new generation of consoles is about to go into full swing with the final entrant —Xbox One—hitting stores tomorrow. The console will initially be available in 14 markets, which includes North America, Australia and half of Europe. The rest of the world will follow suit over the next year. Sadly enough, Microsoft hasn’t revealed anything about an Indian release date.

The console is priced at 499 USD in the US and 599 AUD in Europe. The Europeans seem to be getting the worse deal of the lot, with a price tag of £429 in the UK and 499 Euros in the rest of Europe.

So who’s buying?

The along with the console, buyers will also get the new Kinect bundled in, which if the initial reviews are anything to go by, will be an absolute must to navigate through the Xbox One’s interface through voice commands. It also comes with a new controller which keeps the same layout as the Xbox 360’s controller, but has some new goodies, such as an improved D-pad, rumble motors on the trigger buttons and a reduced profile for the battery pack.

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The Xbox One will feature x86 architecture, which while being a far cry from its predecessors PowerPC architecture, will make cross-platform games much easier to develop. It features 8GB of DDR3 RAM and a 500GB HDD. The processing and graphics are handled by an AMD Jaguar APU. On the software side of things, the console will be able to run the latest version of DirectX and features an interface reminiscent of the Start screen on Windows 8 and 8.1.

A number of day-one titles are available for the console, but not all of them are winners. Check out our list of games you should actually bother saving up for.