A GENERATION REDEFINED

How upgrading to high definition has heightened Nick's Xbox 360 love

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The Xbox 360, the console that ushered in the HD revolution, launched without HDMI support. That's funny when you take a moment to think about it, but I tend to think of that whole era as more of a transitional period. Never mind the fact that games like Halo 3 and Call Of Duty 4 couldn't quite hit 720p, most players I knew simply wouldn't have noticed - like me, they were playing Microsoft's most popular console on the same display technology they had relied on for years. Many of you were probably in the same boat, if contemporary complaints about the readability of text in Dead Rising are anything to go by.

I was a student back when I got my Xbox 360, so my setup wasn't exactly swish - I used the bundled composite cables to connect my powerful new console to the cheapest 14-inch portable TV Asda sold. Quite a few games displayed in letterboxed widescreen on 4:3 displays, making the already suboptimal situation even worse. Things improved considerably when I moved into a new place for my final year and we had a much larger widescreen TV in the living room, but it was still 480i, still composite, and that was the best it ever got.

Of course, I occasionally saw games in their full HD glory. At the