Major Nelson at CES 2006

When there’s a public event involving Xbox 360, you can bet Major Nelson will be on hand. The Major helped man the Xbox portion of the Microsoft booth, offering expertise on Xbox Live in addition to demoing some of the cool gaming offerings. We didn’t get a chance to pit the Major against Chris in an Ali vs. Frasier bout, but he did offer a few tidbits on the state of the state for Xbox 360, expanding on the details about a new manufacturing partner in the console space (announced during the Bill Gates keynote) and some of the details involved in making a game demo live in the Xbox Live marketplace during the keynote event. In my estimation, the big news from CES 2006 is an external HD-DVD player for Xbox 360 announced during the keynote, which means the Xbox team keeps up with the Joneses over at Sony in providing an HD playback experience while also hedging bets that Blu-Ray could still claim the HD shiny disk market.