J Allard talks a lot about taking gaming to the mainstream - taking it out and competing with music and film. Many gamers will cry foul at such a statement, many remembering the damage Sony did to the market when they took gaming to the "mainstream" with the original PlayStation and how it damaged innovation and gameplay in a seemingly endless cycle of sequels, that the mainstream went out and brought every year, sending the really good quality titles on the Sega, Nintendo and Sony systems spiralling downwards, a trend that continues with an ever alarming rapid rate today. Should gamers fear more of the same with Xbox 360?

No they shouldn't. When J Allard talks about taking gaming to the mainstream - he doesn't mean gaming like we gamers have today, he wants to bring it out to the parents and grandparents of today's gamers. Why should games all be blood and gore? The last time I checked my mum couldn't keep herself from playing Spider Solitaire on Windows, that's the market Allard is hoping to take the Xbox 360. After all it's a lot easier for kids to convince their parents what to buy them at Christmas if it has features the parents are quite fond of too. The Xbox 360 has made itself much simpler for the new audience to interact with, wireless controllers, and even the remote - which you could quite easily play a simple card game with. You'll see something like the MSN Gaming Zone for Xbox / Xbox Live Arcade, where someone can just pick up the remote control and go play some card games, or Bejewelled or something. Microsoft put Sony into check quite easily here.

If that's not enough they put Sony into checkmate with the media functions of the Xbox 360, there's just so much you can do. I don't know about you, but I store all my media on my PC. At the moment there's no real way to get it down into the living room and get it enjoyed by everyone easily. This all changes with the Xbox 360, using Windows Media Connect (available for free via Windows Update). I'll be able to stream my pictures, music and videos all down to the Xbox 360. What's more, plug your digital camera, your PSP, your iPod or other MP3 player into the Xbox 360 and have all that content available to you too, all in a really gorgeous and simple to use user interface. Take digital photography today, how people interact with the content is lot different then an old film camera, there's no simple way to view the content unless you've got a PC in the living room, you just don't want your friends and family in a bedroom (where most PCs live), you want to be able to sit around the TV in the living room, put some nice music on in the background and show off your photos, in the way you used to be able to do with print. Xbox 360 allows that, trust me - mums will love this feature.

Then there's the Media Center Extender functionality. Want to record TV with your Xbox 360? You got it, it'll connect up to a Media Center PC (you can buy Windows XP Media Center Edition for about £90), you'll be able to rewind live TV, pause it, record it, set it up to record all episodes in a season, or keep and eye out for films you'd quite like to see at some point and program the Media Center to record them whenever they come on. It gives you the whole rich experience of the Media Center PC - without a PC having to be in the living room, want to hide it away in the cupboard? You can do that and control it all with with Xbox 360. I've got three boxes under my TV at the moment, set top box for the TV, a VCR and the Xbox - the 360 is going to replace all of these. My TV will be handled by a computer in the cupboard, streamed over the network to the Xbox 360. Awesome.

Most non-gamers today see games consoles as "toys" for children (even thought most gamers are in their twenties), the above features are what will propel the Xbox 360 into the mainstream that J Allard talks about, sure it's a gaming device at heart, but it's got shed loads of features that non-gamers are going to love to bits.