You’ll also be pleased to hear that split-screen will be an option, although limited to two people in the Public Beta. We’ve also done something cool with the splitscreen display for HD monitors – instead of stretching the horizontal or vertical axes into big, scary too wide or too tall horrors, we’ve sensibly windowed the action, maintaining lots of screen real estate, but preserving a proper, playable aspect ratio.

This feature we’re testing is for the moment, just a fun addition, that’s planned to grow into something pretty amazing by launch, and that feature is Saved Films. The version you’ll try in the Beta, is very, very, very limited. We just want you to play around with the general concept. You’ll be reading more about this in the gaming press in the next month or two, and of course you can try it out for yourselves in less than a month.

1080p at 60 fps is awesome for fighting games and barely a stretch for Live Arcade games. But if you want epic battles, dozens of bad guys, huge vistas and colossal structures, with advanced AI, HDR lighting and explosive physics, then you’re not getting those at 1080p at 60fps. Actually, that’s not entirely accurate – Halo 3 will display at 1080p through the Xbox Elite with its scaler and HDMI port, but not natively. We’ve seen it do just that and it looks utterly lovely. So if you have a 1080p TV, enjoy it yourself in a few weeks. Most people, and I mean the VAST majority of people don’t have a 1080p TV, so it would be foolish to sacrifice even a single feature for a bullet point number on the back of a box.