Xbox Live Goes Online

abhikhurana writes " Internetnews is reporting that Microsoft has launched Xbox Live broadband gaming service. To access Microsoft's service, Xbox gamers have to buy a $49.99 starter kit, which includes 12 month's worth of access to the Xbox Live service and a headset kit for voice communications. Microsoft said that about 16 games with online play capabilities will be available by the end of the year. So has anyone already tried it? If so, what do you think about it?"

Comments

Good Idea

[acehole]

As with all good ideas involving technology they hardly reach outside of the US, Japan or europe.

In Australia the X-Box is doing okay, still lagging behind the PS2 though. Such a service may never reach our shores, it's a shame because there would be a market here for it.

I guess it would depend if the market was big enough for Microsoft.

It is great!

[gdeciantis]

I have been playing since the beta and I have found that the service is really good and fun. Moto Gp is a fun game on Live, but MechAssault is a whole different world of fun. XBL runs pretty nicely because of all the broadband users. A much better experience that some online gaming on the PC.

Broadband gaming vs. dialup gaming

[roachmotel3]

Frankly, I'm somewhat glad that MS has forced broadband in this product. There's nothing worse than paying the $40 a month for broadband, mostly for gaming, just to get on some awesome CS server where within minutes a bunch of losers with dialup come on and ruin the game for everyone.

By at least setting the bar to broadband they have excluded some gamers, but they will have improved performance for everyone left.

Re:could this be the xbox "killer app"?

[Gary Franczyk]

You could say the same thing about Microsoft's Internet Explorer. For some time, it was known as having less than stellar performance, and for being a copy-cat of Netscape Navigator, with a very similar UI and features.

Since then, it has improved somewhat with its stability and performance, but since Netscape has gone to the wayside, almost no features have been introduced. In fact, most of the changes between version 3 and version 6 have been internal, such as additional automation calls and additional events for programmers to use.

Why PC's are better for this...

[sterno]

In reading your comment, something occurred to me.


The only live capable game I have at the moment is Mech Assault, which is a great game, but I was hoping for a couple more play modes, including Co-Op.


One of the most popular FPS shooters is still Half Life because of the Counterstrike mod. Gamers took a basic game and changed it completely to become the kind of game that they wanted. With an XBox, this isn't going to happen because Microsoft has to keep tight control over the game licensing. If they don't they can't make back all the money they lose on selling the boxes. Furthermore, to even begin writing games you have to buy their SDK which is very expensive for an amateur developer.

This was one of the promises of the Indrema game console that was making me really look forward to its release which will now never happen.