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State of the Xbox
An anonymous reader writes "Xbox head-honcho Robbie Bach has written up a State of the Xbox in which he gloats about the continuing success of the console but fails to say a word about its evolution." From the article: "You may have seen the October Game Developers Magazine, which announced its top 20 Publishers of the Year. Microsoft Game Studios was named the number two publisher, just behind EA, based on revenue as well as use of third-party developers, average critical response to titles, percentage of original intellectual properties (IPs), and developer opinion."
Touting their average critical response is a joke. The gaming press is not exactly a hive of quality journalism. Most gaming magazines and websites are simply deliverers of the gaming industry's press releases. They call it news and charge you extra for movies and such. Review scores are determined by how much hype has been generated and how well the the reviewer is treated by the company. The Driv3r scandal last summer is an example of this.
Why shouldn't people take outside opinions of Microsoft into account when judging the Xbox? What evidence do you have that they won't do the same thing in the video game console market that they've done in every other market they've become the leaders in if they manage to crush the competition? Do you look forward to a world where the Xbox 4 is essentially the last console that exists, because the Xbox 5, 6, anc 7 will just be the same thing in fancier colors and there isn't anybody else out there pushing the state of the art? Microsoft's stuff is always groundbreaking and exciting when they're playing catch up. It's the aftermath you should fear.
Here's my question: How does the XBox handle someone who wants to grab their saves and a game they own and head off to a friend's house (who already owns an XBox)? With the PS2 or Game Cube, you just grab the memory card and the game and head over.
I assume you can copy save games between XBoxs when they're connected to the LAN too. This doesn't come up too often, but still - it does come up occasionally.
I don't really want to get into a flame war, but I really don't see how using a hard drive to save games is any better than using a memory card - the flaws with the memory card (small storage space, slow write speed) don't seem to be large enough to really offset the flaws with using a hard drive (lack of portability, more fragile). They're just different. I'm just curious if the XBox has a solution to bringing save games over to your friend's.
Carrying the XBox over and being able to connect them without requiring a TV for both XBoxes is only worth half credit (since a memory card is much smaller and less prone to break if you drop it on the floor).
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
One thing they fail to note, among all those glowing numbers and SpikeTV accolades:
Have they actually made any money yet? Or are they still bleeding money like they had been the previous 2 years?
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
"a little lithium button battery on the board"
Cool. A suicide battery!
Unfortunately, the only people who are going to understand that joke have already experienced the same let-down that you did.
So for the sake of everybody else who is still wondering if Halo is as polished as the picture Microbungie had been painting since before its release: No, it isn't. It doesn't have a proper ending, whole scenarios that were in the preview movies as the main point of the game (like, oh, defending the Earth in a full-scale ground war) were basically not present. Further, players WILL have to pay for additional content that was not included in the game come March. (Yes, if you have to subscribe to and pay monthly for XBLive to access the final scenarios and the end of the game itself, you are PAYING additional costs unnecessarily for what should have been included in the first place).