Xbox squared: “This lack of an appealing character never really hurt the popularity of the Myth games; however, they were cult hits confined to the much smaller market of computer games. In the console space, where the potential audience is in the tens of millions, the field is dominated by instantly identifiable, engaging personalities, intrinsically linked to their parent console. Nintendo has Mario; Sega, at the peak of its console dominance, had Sonic the Hedgehog. And for its own billion-dollar system, Microsoft leads off with … a guy in a boxy outfit with a title for a name, his humanity masked off by a faceplate of tinted glass. Come to think of it, for a Microsoft product, this is the perfect figurehead. It’s also branding suicide.”