"The Xbox 360 is said to be a machine that's easy to develop for, but that's because it has a good line-up of middleware and infrastructure. So it should be easy to create something that's up to a certain level [of quality]. But if you try to take advantage of the Xbox 360’s full hardware specs, you'll find out about the difficulty in programming for a multi-core machine," said Itagaki.

Itagaki said that the Xbox 360's 512MB of main memory is more than enough for games, but he feels that the machine's media might bring up some problems. He said he would have preferred if Microsoft adopted the high-capacity HD-DVD format, but said, given the next-gen disc format wars, he could live with Microsoft's decision.