XBox 360 Dev Details

Gamasutra has some notes from a recent presentation Microsoft gave at GDC Europe concerning new aspects of developing for the 360. There are some interesting points - for instance, the 360 Guide is different from the Dashboard in that the Dashboard is a stand-alone environment before the player enters a game whereas the Guide runs concurrently with gameplay. There's also some facts about player achievements which will be part of every profile:

As well as these more general options, one of the most interesting elements of the Xbox 360 player profile is its title-specific data, which is created and managed by an individual game, and includes achievements, in which the game decides what in-game elements are worth rewarding, as well as points allocated for completing each achievement. These achievements will be viewable on the player's own machine, but also over Xbox Live and on the Web, and those playing will be able to compare achievements with their friends.

There will be a minimum of 5 'achievements' per game title, set by the creators of that game, but if desired, the developer can set up to 50 achievements. Since a gamer will have an overall cumulative score over all the games that he plays, each achievement can have a score associated with it, up to a total of 1,000 points for the game. He told attendees that Xbox 360 developers can also hold back points from the 1,000 total if they want to associate some with downloadable content or updates, but those points must be tied to accomplishments within the updates - it's not possible to simply give people points for buying extra content!

-- Integrating Xbox 360-Specific Features Into Games

It also goes into specifics about framerates and resolutions. Sounds like some additional overhead for anyone developing 360 content, but some definate wins for the gamer as well.