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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 problem here is that people instantly lambash the box without thinking of the ramifications. Basically:
- It's a strong PC with great graphics. In the living room. The centerpiece of the family community.
- It is a console to actually push competition and strengthen games. Other consoles from here on out are going to have to consider putting an ethernet card on board. Or a hard drive. Competition is always good (even non-franchise reliant Sony is getting stale at this point).
- It's just another system. It's not the antichrist. Bill Gates personally doesn't take a cut on each box (in fact, cuts are probably taken out of HIM).
Let's think about that first one a good deal. A real PC. In the living room of thousands of people -- people, additionally, who wouldn't have thought of putting a PC in their living room. Why doesn't this get more people excited? It does for me. Naysayers like to tout X-Filish conspiracy theories about MS owning the world. It's not going to happen. Other companies are going to expand, reject, and strengthen parts of the box with 3rd party peripherals and software. The dream of having some kind of decent server in everyone's house will finally be realized.
Even if you completely reject the box and all it's strong points, you've got to admit THE CONVERSATION IS GOOD. Unfortunately, even with a thousand comments, Slashdot editors won't learn that this is one of the things we want to talk about. And quite frankly, I still like to follow the average Slashdotter's opinion over hype.
But it is essentially.. at least, according to Cringley, it's the expansion into new areas like gaming consoles that Microsoft desperately needs in order to keep growing at the necessary rate to avoid going bankrupt.
Look at it from a positive consumer viewpoint -- as previous slashdoters have mentioned, Microsoft are essentially selling a half-decent PC at below cost. Get yerself an X-Box, get Linux running on it, and have a good laugh at them.
Slashdot's fashion pages will be next.
The reviewer is a contributing editor for gameslice apparently, but considering gameslice has had about 10 updates in the past year, I doubt he's working very hard in that respect.
Sony seems to think the xbox is going to force them to abandon PS2 sooner than they anticipated....and roll out the PS3...check it out here.
Full Story
--GuntherAEPi
"
you claim things are good (such as having a PC in the living room or having an ethernet or a harddrive on a console) but you don't explain why these things are good.
i'll tell you my take; both of those things are not good in and of themselves.
i don't have my PC in my living room, it's in my bedroom. the console is in the living room with the TV. i play different games on them, completely different (RTS, RPG on the computer, Gran Turismo, Mario, Zelda, Final Fantasy (which are not RPG IMHO) on the console.)
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. same with having a hard drive. great, it'd lead to faster and more saved games. dandy. personally i don't run out of space on my memory cards, but that's me. this by itself is not a reason to buy a console.
as this salon article says (and i hate salon), it's the games, stupid. great games sell consoles, mediocre games sell a few as will the flood of adverts that MS has put out.
but in the end, there are no interesting games for the console, thus it is uninteresting and will ultimately fail.
personally, i'm spending $700 on a new computer which has more than twice the power (and 5 times the storage space, and that's nothing) of the X-box. there are actually interesting games for this computer i'm buying; civ3, dark ages of camelot, max payne (which i still haven't played), et cetera.
anyway, this is a dead horse i'll stop beating it.
...dave
Think different? I'd be happy if most people would just think...
I am giving the domain xboxlinux.com to the first person to successfully port/install Linux to the X-Box. No cost, no strings except you must be willing to continue work on it and release it to the public in some form.
Hammer of Truth
hmm yeah - I played GTA3 a couple of times on a friends PS2 and whilst it was very very beatiful, inclusing reflections of the secnery in the gleaming paintwork (and I could elect to drive my actual real life car which was kinda wierd)at the end of the graphical amazement, it left me cold - basically - it is *nothing* like driving a car. It may have been a different story with a wheel to steer with rather than that funny joystick thing, but I I'm not prepared to spend the £250 to find out :)
:)
We played some other PS2 titles (which I forget the name of, although one was a Sar Wars title) and I came away thinking "hmm so basically, scenery of one type or another scrolls towards you, and you steer" This seemed the basic premise of most of the games. In some you could shoot things as well, whilst others you just avoided obstacles (snowboarding was one excuse). The annoying thing that all these games had in common, is that you are never *really* in control of your ship/board/car/shopping trolley etc as the game will just not let you move outside of the "approved" area of the scenery. For example, I couldn't fly out of the canyon in the SW game. But there was no apparent reason for this, it was just arbitrary.
The only other basic type involved 2 psuedo 3d avatarsviewed in 3rd person who face off in some osrt of kickboxing fight. The game appeared to be won by pressing everything on the controller at the same time rapidly.
Apparentley, GT3 is hailed as one of the best if not the best console game. Hmm well if a very pretty version of "horace goes skiing" is the state of the art, I'll stick to me PC this time around. With games like Star Wars Galaxies and Planetside from Sony coing next year, it's gonna be a blast.
Before I get flamed by all the console lovers, I should state that I fully recognise that the console has a place - it's damm sight cheaper than a PC for start (My video card cost more than a PS/2), and is more easily accesible by non "hardcore" gamers who just want a bit of a laff with their mates round the TV with the aforementioned beer and pizza, and not to have to spend the first few days of playing any new game, writing macros and message binds, and downloading the essential addons and extra maps you need to play in the "big league" - in many ways, the very flexibility offered by the PC as a games platform provides many more potential ways to cheat. And cheating is what ruins many an online multiplayer gaming experience - just ask any Counterstrike player. These games are effectivley being driven onto the private LAN tournament scene where inspections of the players kit whilst in play are possible leaving just the casual games on the 'net. Serious tournaments are almost impossible on the Internet because of the cheating opportunities available by simply hacking the models or game client. These client mods are undetectable by the server. So, with the "closed" nature of console games (ie you can't write your own config scripts or alter the models, sounds and textures ) perhaps there will be a resurgence of serious Internet based multiplayer play. That is, until the consoles start to look so much like a PC that they suffer the same fate...
OK the ramble factor has reached the "shut up now scoot" stage so I'll not bore oyu any more
This may be a stupid question, but how does it play DVD movies? I mean, obviously it has a DVD-ROM, but where does the software to play it come from? Do you need a boot CD to load up the OS/player, then you swap in the DVD? Or is there a small Windows OS on the hard disk itself that contains a player? If there's a Windows OS on the HD, what's stopping the natural corruption of some DLL's and the player breaking?
Also part of that investor group was Wasserstein Perella Group, Inc., which has done M&A transactions for AOL (http://www.wassersteinperella.com/about/transacti ons.htm).
It's a stretch, but not a BIG stretch. AND this is off 10 minutes of research.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
I think this line from the article says it best:
So for the first time, I actually dared to entertain warm thoughts toward Microsoft.
Yeah, no kidding that he doesn't normally like Microsoft. I would never have guessed it from the consistently cynical tone of his article.
I'm no big fan of MS either, but jeez. Would a little unbiased journalistic integrity be appropriate? Hmm.
As it is, I don't think that I know anything more about how good the XBox is after reading the article than I did beforehand -- because I don't even begin to trust the opinions of the journalist with his obvious baggage of preconceptions.
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
Let's review Microsoft history, shall we?
Netscape 1 sucked on toast
IE1 sucked on toast with cherries on top
Netscape was usable
IE2 sucked on toast
Netscape 3 was great
IE3 was usable
Netscape 4 was big and bloated and didn't add anything useful
IE4 was great
Netscape 5... never happened
IE5 refined IE4 a bit
Netscape 6 sucked, from what I understand to be because it wasn't mature enough
IE6 was yet another refinement
Of course, Mozilla is another story...
Netscape is now yesterday's news and Microsoft is the 800-pound gorilla in yet another area. Netscape lost this battle primarily because they couldn't code as well as Microsoft... and they even had a serious head start (but does anyone really remember what a complete piece of crap NS1 was?)
When Microsoft decides to compete with someone they usually won't win in round 1 (at least if they play fair), but when you're a half-trillion dollar company, you can afford to both throw incredible amounts of resources at a problem and wait a few years for an industry-leading product to gel out of it. If the XBox is "as good" or "about the same" as a PS2 (better than being about the same as a PS/2, I think), then I would bet that the XBox-2 has a good chance to exceed the PS3.
I think the XBox's potential lies in the ability (I would assume) to easily port Windows code over to it. I'm not a Linux programmer, but I am a Windows programmer so that appeals to me. Of course, the day someone ports Linux to the XBox, I will laugh as hard as anyone else.
I'd love to see MAME ported to the XBox... that HD would hold all near-3000 ROMs. To me these days the consoles are more interesting now for the games that are distributed for them, but what they can be hacked to do.
In the meantime, enjoy the games!
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
I hate to sound like a conspiracy theorist - but there's something bugging me...
When the Dreamcast was released, one of the big points they tried to make (to the point of putting the emblem on the console itself) was that it would run WinCE. Obviously, MS had a part in this, and it was the first time we'd really seen them step into the console market (aside from the sublicensing of some games).
Most developers, however, used Sega's proprietary OS instead of WinCE. There were only a handful of games that used WinCE, and not many were really high-profile.
So MS lost out - their plan to license their OS into the console market failed.
Then Sega makes the announcement - they're out of the console business - the Dreamcast is dead (long live the Dreamcast!).
On top of that, MS announces they are entering the console market, and Sega announces most of their signature games will be on the XBox.
It just seems a little too convenient, how Sega (who had at least some business relations with MS for their console) falls out of the way just before MS comes in.
I think too much.
Heh... yeah, I've always loved hearing people call the Mac "a toy, because it has no good games."
My guess has always been that playing the Monotonous-FPS-of-the Month on a Windows box rots the part of the brain that allows irony to be detected.
As for the XBox, I'm not buying it, or the GameCube, or the PS2. Got enough classic consoles to keep me happy, the ones that were made back when gameplay mattered... not just the same three lame styles of games with purtier and purtier pixchurs every year.
~Philly
In spite of the fact that I already think that people are incredibly stupid, and in spite of seeing decades of evidence of the incredible stupidity of people on probably at least a weekly basis, stories like this (these eBay auctions) still somehow manage to boggle my mind and make me shake my head in wonder and disbelief. I find myself searching for possible rational explanations. So far the only explanation I can come up with that makes sense to me is that perhaps the bidders on these auctions were mostly foreigners with very poor English skills (possibly having recently moved e.g. to the US), who would not only easily have misunderstood the descriptions (understanding probably mostly just the main keywords), but would themselves (in a sort of naive trusting of people, and in good faith) never have believed or even considered that anyone would attempt such ridiculous auctions. If that was the case, I wonder if there would be any legal implications. Probably not, but still, if somebody deliberately and knowingly conned a naive immigrant with poor English skills, it seems a bit on the shady side.
I work at a Best Buy, and our Xbox display unit freezes at least once every two hours, and we have to reset it. ( I usually leave it froze until a customer asks me to reset it, so more people can see that this thing freezes, heh heh). So far our gamecube has not froze once, we can leave it on all day with no problems. The only difference between the display units and the consumer ones is the demo units don't have the hard drive.