If you want to pose an uncomfortable question to a member of Microsoft’s Xbox team, ask them what they would most like the Xbox 360 to be remembered for: Gears of War or Kinect. On the one hand, Epic’s third-person shooter series has not only managed to sustain the machine’s relevance to a bevy of core gamers, it has also provided something of a developmental road map beyond Halo. On the other, the company wants the machine to pull in families whose gaming sensibilities are more likely to be informed by Farmville than Fenix.

Such is the tightrope Microsoft walks when pitching the Xbox 360 in 2011. Its Xbox Showcase event in San Francisco on Friday (NZDT) erred more on the gamer side of the equation – but not by much.

Here are some of the more notable titles on show.