Tom's Hardware Reviews the Xbox

steddyj writes: "Tom's Hardware released this article which looks deep into the Xbox, its peripherals, and just about everything from every angle, and compares it to the PS. Incredibly detailed article."

Comments

Japan

[Wind_Walker]

It's going to be a moot point, anyways. Once the Xbox launches in Japan (February 22, if memory serves) and it flops, you're going to see all the 3rd party developers in Japan jump ship faster than... something really fast.

Games are what matters on a console, not how many polygons it can push. The Japanese launch lineup for the Xbox is pathetic. There are 4 snowboarding games, DoA3 (a practical port of DoA2, a launch game for PS2 a year ago), and Genma Onimusha, when Onimusha has been out for more than 6 months on the PS2.

When the Japanese launch of the Xbox flops, the Japanese developers will jump ship. When the Japanese developers jump ship, the Xbox will lose about 60% of its title lineup. When 60% of the titles go to other platforms, people will stop buying the Xbox. When people stop buying the Xbox, the other 40% will jump ship to either the PS2 or the Gamecube.

To be a big player in the console industry, you have to have both countries. As a corollary, just because something does well in one country does not automatically spell success in the other country.

In 2 years, nobody will remember the Xbox. It will have entered the Gaming Lore books right along side the 3DO, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Tubro Grafix 16, and dozens of other systems that went obsolete because they had no games.

Milking the Europeans again

[Max von H.]

"...the announced european price of 480 is way too much. Microsoft has a strange way of computing the exchange rate between dollars and euros... Games with a maximum price of $50, or 65 in Europe, are expensive, but those prices are the same ones PS2 uses, at least in the United States. In Europe, PS2 games are cheaper and Microsoft should bring its prices into alignment."

Indeed, condidering $1 = 1.15 at today's rate, that's $417. In the USA, the Xbox is $300, which is 345. This is a complete ripoff! The days electronics were over-overpriced compared to the US are gone, this is pure extorsion(sp?)! How do they justify the extra $117? Shipping fees? Let me laugh...

For this price I can build a complete PC with a Duron 1GHz and a good graphics card (GF2 ultra or so), so COME_ON! Who's gonna pay that price for just a game console? PC prices have crashed to a point the PS2 itself is now a mere $235 where I live (Switzerland, outside the EU, I know :) so it can be sold, but the XBox will be twice the price with a hundred times less games to start with... The PS2 is hugely popular whereas Microsoft is still unknown on that market... No doubt the Xbox is a lot more powerful than the ps2, has a HD, etc... But when for the same price you could get a real PC that'll play games even better, and with which you can do whatever you want, I think M$ is trying hard to rip-off markets on which it can (still) freely impose its monopolistic dirty hands.

/jabba