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Gamespy Reveals Xbox Next Specs
Gamespy's reporters have been on the ground at the GDC, and managed to wrangle specifications for Microsoft's upcoming next-gen console. From the article: "Xenon's CPU has three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores. Each core is capable of two instructions per cycle and has an L1 cache with 32 KB for data and 32 KB for instructions. The three cores share 1 MB of L2 cache. Alpha 2 developer kits currently have two cores instead of three."
From TFA: ... incredible textures...).
The Xenon is an extremely impressive piece of hardware. It will allow gamers to see things like complex lighting in gameplay, amazing details through high-level shading (impeccable clouds
WOW! All that, plus superlative superlatives!
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Thief: Deadly Shadows had a pretty bad flaw resuming a game saved at whatever difficulty reverted the game back to normal difficulty. I wrote Eidos Customer Support about an xbox live or physical update to T:DS and received this:
"Microsoft never gave us approval to release a new version". How's that for a kick in the pants? So for this new xbox I'm going to sit tight until a modchip is released and do nothing but "try before I buy".
Trolling is a art,
Maybe I'm behind the times, but this is the first I've heard of a camera as a part of the Xbox2. If they make the hard drive optional, it seems they should make the camera optional.
I can't believe that more people would want a camera in their Xbox2 than a hard drive.
Great. Now I'm going to have to watch idiots taunt me over Live rather than just hear them.
My userid is prime!
Live enabled != Live play. I won't be giving anything about the next xbox since I don't know anything, but even in the current generation a game being Live enabled means that you can receive invites to play games on Live even if the game is single player only. Play Sands of Time and your friend can see you are "Live enabled" and invite you play Halo 2. Its pretty freakin sweet.
GameCube's disks were a mistake? Last I heard they made load times faster and helped prevent piracy...
The question is - how much will it cost, and like the original XBox, will it be subsidised by Microsoft again? If so, then either Microsoft is either willing to take risks, or desperate to take over the console market. Three 3.0Ghz PPC cores can't be that cheap...
I'm looking forward to a time when it doesn't matter what game console you have, any more than it matters what brand TV or DVD player you use to watch movies. As an art form, video games could really benefit from breaking away from the hardware. Plenty of games are cross-platform already, but that's not really the same thing. I don't go and buy Lord of the Rings films for a Sony DVD player or a Panasonic, I get them in a standard format. Sony had plans to do this and turn Playstation into a "platform" a while back, but to my knowledge, nothing ever came from that.
I think it should not to matter whether there's a Sony or Nintendo machine under my TV. I'd still like to play Nintendo _games_, and fans of Gran Tourismo etc will still want to play Sony _games_, but the machine shouldn't matter. For that to happen, some somewhat arbitrary standards have to be chosen, a bullet none of Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft would be thrilled to bite. There would need to be a standard lowest-common-denominator controller. As much as I like the GameCube controller, I think something like Sony's DualShock2 should be the baseline. If, for example, Nintendo wanted to market a compatible with better ergonomics and a modified button layout, they can have at it, and the market will reflect what shapes/weights people like best. While we're on the subject, the wires have to go; Nintendo got it 100% right with the WaveBird, and four players on one box has to be the minimum supported. No more multitaps; they're ridiculous. A standard memory card is also needed. I'd personally love the ability to use USB thumb drives, but any standard will do. A minimum set of performance specs must also be defined. Three PowerPC's and an ATI something-or-other sounds just fine to me, but it could be anything that reads some standard game executable format and pushes X number of polygons, does Y amount of floating point calculations, etc. The megahertz can't matter anymore, and we're nearly there now.
Imagine being able to buy a game console anywhere from a no-name brand at $200 to a posh big-name one at $500, with newer, smaller, cheaper models coming out all the time, just as with VCRs and DVD players. Some of these consoles will also play DVD movies, some will also do time-shifting PVR stuff, some will have USB ports, some will include legacy PlayStation or GameCube compatibility (or both!) and you would buy one depending on your needs, just as you do with the rest of your equipment. Whichever one you get, Gran Tourismo 6 and Halo 4 and Super Mario Moonshine will all play on it. Period.
If and when video game consoles work like that, I'll no longer be cursing Sega for picking the wrong box to put Panzer Dragoon on, or find myself dropping a couple hundred extra dollars so I can play Metal Gear Solid. I wish I had some idea of how realistic this little fantasy of mine is. I never thought we'd have two rounds of consoles from three strong players, but that's what we're getting. Traditionally in video games, the fewer machines, the better (why waste shelf space on three different releases of the same third-party game?) but loads of compatible machines, that could remove the last of the silliness from console gaming.