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You mean one of these?

Hori DoA4 Arcade Stick

"First of all, you're not going to play a good RTS, RPG, MMORPG, FPS or strategy game on a console. How are you going to play Civilization IV on a console? Who wants to play an FPS with a crappy controller and "auto-aiming"?"

Old myths never die. They just live on in slashcomments.

"It instead competed by traditional means, and made the Xbox a success through its smart business practices, games, and focus on offering a central unified online gaming service."

Having effectively unlimited funds doesn't hurt either. Unlike other companies, Microsoft had no exit strategy if the XBox tanked -- other than pouring more money into it.

I once told a friend that with Microsoft's cash reserves, they could pretty much afford to give away 10-12 million XBox bundles and still have a ton of play money left over. Even if each giveaway cost the company $500-$1000, it wouldn't deplete their cash reserves. What other companies could afford to do that??

Add the so many million that Microsft lost on the X-Box, I know I cost Microsoft a cool $76 by only purchasing Halo 2 and a $10 copy of GTAIII with my X-Box.

Profit loss per XBox: $100 per $199 console.
Units sold since 2001: Approx 15M.

Let's say the loss of $1.5B is wildly exaggerated because Microsoft began selling their unit for $150 at some point in time (I don't remember when). Well consoles bought at $150 lose $50, assuming their manufacturing process didn't get any cheaper. If all 15M consoles were bought at 15M, then that would make a loss of $750M.

Now, I've also heard that buying more than 10 games for your XBox will profit MS from the royalties or whatever such fees exist for developing on their platform. According to this survey, Only 50% of XBox unit owners purchased more than 10 games. Let's be statistically illogical and say this cuts their losses in half, now we're still at $375M.

This magically makes the profit of the XBox and Halo2 combined come out to -$125M. Now we have a reasonable profit goal for Peter Jackson to achieve with this movie. He can probably take a bigger nap than he did making King Kong. I actually saw the whole video documentary of Bryan Singer having to come in and direct for Peter Jackson 'cause he was napping on the couch. It was superb.

You really like your Xbox huh?

1) You just know that I'm right. =P The reason this is an issue is that it's the primary bottleneck on the Xbox. Faster GPU means nothing if it's sitting there waiting for its data half the time. GameCube has huge bandwidth between the CPU and GPU, and the memory chosen for GameCube specializes in quick seek time. Meaning that developers may optimize to the hardware to a great degree.

2) Whatever. I honestly don't care if my sound is in 4.1 Dolby Prologic 2 or 5.1 Dolby Digital. They sound nearly identical to me. (I did check on this though, and you are correct, in that it's not 2.1... it's 5.1, but only 4 or 5 out of the 6 5.1 channels are actually used, bringing it down to the level of Prologic II). My last word on this subject, as I think that the sound on both consoles is perfectly adequate, and has absolutely nothing to do with the subject at hand.

3) Your friends have no problems with crashing. Mine do. Your word against mine, I honestly don't care. But other people do have these problems. I'm most certainly not going to buy an Xbox to win a stupid argument online.

4) Ever play Metroid Prime? Or Metal Gear Solid? Or Eternal Darkness? Show me an Xbox game with better load times.

5) Rogue Squadron III pushes about 14 to 15 million polys per second. Halo 2 pushes something like 7 or 8 million per second. The thing is that Bungie REDUCED the poly count from Halo 1 to Halo 2 in favor of more effects. Factor 5 upped both the poly counts and the effects. Asserting that my assertion that Rogue Squadron III has a higher poly count is wrong is just plain WRONG. Deal with it. =P (honestly, I don't know why I'm still debating this with you after that comment).

GameCube is firmly in second place in worldwide sales. The reason being that Xbox's lineup is VERY American, while GameCube has a nice mix of Japanese/American games, as well as a whole whack of games not available elsewhere (Baten Kaitos, Zelda, Mario, Metroid, Starfox, Eternal Darkness, Resident Evil, Crystal Chronicles, Tales of Symphonia (in the US), etc.) (While Xbox really just has Halo to call its own, relying on empty promises of better graphics to sell systems).

Being that this will probably be my last post on the subject, I will just say that my original post was referring to the fact that the Xbox's hardware does not seem to be gaming oriented in the slightest. I think if you take a careful look at the hardware, it's in plain sight that the design choices made were out of laziness rather than any desire to squeeze more power out of the system. It's designed to be a general purpose computing machine. GameCube was designed purely to play games. I think I've shown that as well as I can without digging through hundreds of google queries to find the links I need to absolutely prove my claims. You can say "You're just plain wrong" all that you want, but I don't think your views on this are any more valid than mine as it stands. I could get more links to prove my claims, but this is again in the territory of "not caring enough to bother". I honestly don't care if you think that I'm an idiot and the Xbox is clearly the superior console.

Not according to this article citing Microsoft as a source.

"Microsoft celebrates its busiest weekend ever largely attributed to the consoles recently released Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six 3 videogame. Over the weekend a total of 24,478 gamers signed into go head to head in gun blasting covert ops action. Microsoft reports counting 6,731 people simultaneously playing the latest hit from developers Ubisoft at one point during the weekend. Totals for all games on the Xbox Live service show up to 83,652 players signing in and spending a total of 262,268 hours playing."

Activision is essentially telling its Xbox customers to fuck themselves. [...] At a time when every other game came with online features, Tonk Hawk 4 topped out at 2 players and no other features.

That's because Microsoft won't let you develop online multiplayer games for Xbox unless you agree to let Microsoft own your customer data and host your online presence on Microsoft software. Activision and EA won't agree to that, so no online Xbox multiplayer. Don't like it? Blame Microsoft for acting like they have a console monopoly and can make developers agree to anything.

Then again, since you bought an Xbox and are actively supporting Microsoft's attempt to take over the video game industry, even if Activision aren't actually telling you to go fuck yourself, I'd be only too glad to.