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XBox Released
Gallowglass writes: "Salon has written a review of the Xbox which damns with extremely faint praise." There was a big hoopla in Times Square last night, but apparently no one pied Bill Gates. So, for all you poor souls who lined up to give money to the borg: does it work? Any blue-screens yet? :) Update: 11/15 15:23 GMT by M : Okay, I'm sorry. That's green screen of death, not blue screen.
the register is also carrying a story about this. it talks about the uk release date as well as containing links to sites with more info on where to buy it and where you can test them out.
...take a look at C|Net's review of Microsoft's strategies with the Xbox. Bottom line of their article is that Microsoft has had to put on a completely different face to court developers for their game console, switching from monopolistic tyrant to play-nice we-want-to-help-you-succeed hardware investor. According to the quotes cited, it's worked, too. So far.
Kindly get your facts straight.
There is a _major_ difference - the PS2 won't/can't do any resolutions above the NTSC standard 480i. That looks like crap on anything bigger than a 32" tube TV, and pales in comparison to the HD quality games that you can play on a PC. XBOX games are 480p (non-interlaced) at least, and the developers have the option of making them 16:9 - not by letterboxing, but by having more horizontal resolution. This is the #1 reason I've been waiting for the XBOX, as NTSC stuff just looks poor on my 120" FPTV.
Think outside the... Hey, where'd the friggin' box go?
an ethernet connection on a console isn't some gaming messiah. there are currently no games which i could see benefitting from this on any console, nor any in the future.
I share your opinion with PC good for some games, console for others (although, I'll add sports games to the console). Now you mentioned "Gran Turisimo" and I mention "sports" for console. Once you play a game for, say, a month, you understand the AI and what to expect. The only way you get replayability is by playing the unpredictable human opponents. Especially for Racing and Sports games. Ethernet is a messiah for consoles, because I can play my football games over and over again, and still lose, cause there's always a better human opponent out on the net (and the computer isn't a challenge anymore).
Just my opinion.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Some of the higher quality TVs now will de-interlace incoming NTSC signals, and smooth out the picture by interpolating between the lines.
The result is that the picture looks like it has a higher resolution than it actually posseses.
So having NTSC input isn't as bad as it used to be.