Ah, Microsoft, the phrase “one step forward, two steps back” seems to have been made with you in mind…  Welcome gamers to this latest edition of the Rabid Gamer. Instead of boring you with an intro, let’s just head into the main bit of news we’ve just received… and it could be a deal breaker when it comes to the new “Xbox 720″.

First, the good news, just cos I love torturing you guys and making you wait The good news here is Xbox is, according to Gamerant, going to move into the present, and instead of DVDs, we’ll finally have Blu-ray discs. That’s right, no more swapping discs in the middle of a case in LA Noire, no more frantic searches around the house, and best of all, they are very hard to scratch, so the games will definitely last longer! Oh, and it’ll also ship with the Kinect 2 (yay?). Personally, I still find Kinect one boring with only a few interesting games to make it worth bothering plugging in.

There’s also another piece of good news. According to IGN, the Xbox 720 could be six times more powerful than the current Xbox. That’s good for two reasons: A) More power = better graphics. But, more importantly: B) This means they’re still concentrating on making GAMES instead of just force feeding us apps that don’t work (UFC I’m looking at you!)

Now, here comes the bad news… According to that same article, as well as Forbes.com, Xbox 720 will not allow you to play used games. Yup… I’ll let you digest that for a minute. You back with me? That’s right, it’s no joke. Right now it’s just a rumor, but with reputable websites like Forbes.com, it’s becoming more and more of a scary possibility.

According to Kotaku.com, even though they’re not sure how, Microsoft intends to make sure we can only play new games. They theorize that each copy of the game would be linked to an Xbox Live account. Now, that could be worked around if you don’t want to go online, but as we’ve seen before, they could just force us to be online if we want to play.

Not sure what I’m talking about? Two years ago Final Fight was released on Xbox Live and on PSN. Now, the Xbox version was fantastic, easy to play and had no problems… the PSN version however… If you weren’t online, even during single player, the game quit on you. That’s right, you had to be online or you couldn’t play. Capcom apologised for not warning players, but said that’s what the DRM was for, so that we wouldn’t share our games with others. As you can imagine, that went over REALLY well…

So, what do you think? Could this be just a scare? Or is Micro$oft dumb enough to go through with its plans of not letting people play used games? And what do you think of the Xbox 720 being a lot more powerful? Happy? Neutral? Air your thoughts and have a great day. Until next time, this has been your Rabid Gamer.