Tom's Hardware Reviews Xbox Live

VividU writes "Tom's Hardware has a review of Xbox Live." Also includes a bit of a summary of the state of networked gaming on the other 2 major consoles (Coleco and Intellivision). A good read if you're looking to see what's going to keep you glued to your couch in 2003.

Comments

Re:Warning - Old Xboxes Don't Work!

[Viewsonic]

Perhaps he meant that he needed a DSL/CABLE router so he could actually use it? Those are typically around $100 ...

Summary of Review

[Mulletproof]

Cripes, that is a needlessly long rewiew... Did the man have a quota of pages to fill? Here's the summary from another person who has been with Live since Beta-

If you have any sort of hardware knowledge at all (ie; are a regular reader of Slashdot), connecting Live will be cake, unless you have a real exotic network configuration, since the process is pretty well automated. A keyboard is seriously need to fill out the registration info, but doing so can still be done in under 10 minutes without one.

Live itself works well, but is still rough around the edges. The interface for some options is not the same as others from game to game. It's even non-existant in some cases. Live is in serious need of standardization in all honesty. Other than that, it's pretty smooth playing in most cases, though the occasional laggy player will dampen your gaming experience.

Live titles are kinda slim pickins right about now, the majority of them being sports related. Ghost Recon, Unreal Championship and Mech Assault are strong contenders, though each has it's own interface issue. Be that as it may, I suspect MS is working on the problem and I've heard up to 80 Live enabled games to be availible around next Christmas. Likewise, the downloadable content isn't in any sort of quantity yet, though some is there. I'd be surprised if it didn't increase as Live matures.

Verdict: If things stay the way they are now, I can't justify another year ofLive, especially after having grown up in a PC gaming environment. But I don't think they will stay the same. They've been getting plenty of feedback from the boards and it's still in it's infancy. Aside from playing select games from a limited collection, I think the biggest draw right now is reserving you Game Tag. Waiting at this point certainly won't hurt, that fact aside.

Wow... And that was less than a page too... :p

Re:This is a LIE - It warns of a BIOS UPGRADE

[Troed]

The parent is trolling.

(I'm one of the Xbox-hackers. I know what I'm talking about here)

The connections needed to flash the internal flash rom from a program running in the Xbox are NOT CONNECTED. It's possible to connect them if you open up the Xbox and solder yourself - but a virgin Xbox CAN NOT have it's BIOS flashed. Not by you, not by Microsoft.