Slashdot Mirror
First Xbox 360 Reviews Hitting the Web
An anonymous reader writes "The first reviews for Xbox 360 games are starting to hit the web! 1UP has reviewed Kameo, Project Gotham Racing 3, FIFA Soccer 2006, NBA 2K6, and Amped 3, while IGN has reviewed Madden NFL 06, Kameo, and NBA 2K6. Judging from both sets of reviews, it looks like Project Gotham Racing 3 - which scored a 10/10 on 1UP - is the only sure winner of the 360 launch games thus far."
Personally, I'm holding off til later I think. Unless Perfect Dark Zero scores a massive 9 something everywhere (ala Halo at Xbox launch), there just won't be any great games til Christmas at the earliest.
Where are the first person shooters and Adventure/RPG games? Or better yet something completely diffrent. Are there going to be any launch titles like that?
What I find interesting about reviews during this time is that those who have to have the 360 have already bought, and likely already know which of the 20 or 30 games available they will buy. It's not like there will be anyone with a 360 who has not already been planning on buying one. So, just how useful is a review like this when, pretty much by definition, the likely consumers have already made up their minds?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
8.0/10.0
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
How good is it as a multimedia machine? What file formats and codecs does it play? Should I go for a chipped xbox, or wait for the xbox 360?
Slagborr
Does anyone else see what I see? All but one of these is a sequel! Where, O where, have the original fun-to-play games gone? :(
From the Project Gotham Racing 3 review: "PGR3's use of motion blur is similarly effective. Every object in the environment blurs realistically as speeding vehicles tear through the tracks"
I've driven pretty fast. I once drove a Dodge Viper around a race track and got some pretty wicked speed, hitting about 150mph on the back straight. What didn't I see? Motion blur.
I understand that the designers want to give the player a better sense of speed, but real environments don't blur, they simply move by too quickly to see any detail. It's even worse when the reviewers start to declare unrealistic effects as very realistic. It's like in a movie when a car careens over an embankment and explodes. Sure, the explosion looked realistic *if cars actually exploded when they crashed* (even the Pinto didn't explode like that). Same thing here... I'm sure the bluring is very close to what it would actually look like *if environments actually did blur at high speeds*.
On an unrelated note, I loved the special effects in Star Wars Episode III. Those lightsabers looked very realistic.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I'm sorry, I actually just took my old one and spun it around really fast.
I mean let's be real: This is a GAME console, if you don't care about it for playing games, there's little reason to get one, espically at the current prices. $500 is plenty to build a media PC better than any X-box.
I think people looking to do this are expecting both, not one or the other. For me, for it to pay off it has to be a DVD, a Tivo, and a game box.
C//
Giving a game perfect score doesn't sound like something a respectable reviewer should do.
10 out of 10 possible indicates perfection, something that can't be improved. Suppose that a year later,
the game gets a sequel with some improvements. More cars, more levels - the usual sequel stuff. Shouldn't
that also receive a perfect score of 10, since it is the same "perfect" game, but just... better?
I do understand that scores are meant to be read like the bible, that they are just general guidelines and
that you really need to read the review. But scores are what will be quoted on advertisements, and a pretty clearly hype-influenced perfect score is just sad.
I'm on the fence right now. I think I want a console. It'd be my fist console since the SNES, I've been a PC-only gamer for that long. However the 360 is tempting me. There's lots of titles that sound interesting, and I have a nice HDTV and surround setup now that I want to play on.
The deciding factor is going to be how good the games sound. If there's enough 360 games that sound really good, I think I'll take the plunge and get one. If not, I'll stick with my PC as my only game platform.
1UP
Kameo: 7.0
Project Gothem Racing 3: 10.0
Fifa Soccer 2006: 7.0
NBA 2K6: 7.0
Amped 3: 7.0
IGN
Madden 2006 : 8.0
Kameo : 8.4
NBA 2K6 : 7.8
I recognize that most of these are sports games, and sports game revies have been dropping lately, but these scores seem pretty 'Average' (that is, not very impressive). Certainly PGR 3 seems to have scored well, but is one racing game really going to move systems?
Seeing these scores for Kameo is a real dissapointment; I really enjoyed Rare's games for the N64 and wanted them to recapture their greatness.
Well another smashing piece of hardware hits the streets, so what ? The games are still lame. They are much more beautiful than on the previous one sure but what about interest ?
Blasting monsters or whatnot is not my cup of tea (or coffee or mountain dew or whatever), I'm fed up with micromanaging my armada in the 3565654684th copy of the click fest called warcraft and I don't care much to see sprites living their own lives on screen. MMORPG are a bug nightmare and a support pit. So what's left ?
(Answer : another useless shiny box full of top of the line hardware gathering dust somewhere on a shelf)
malheureusement la stupidité n'est ni curable, ni mortelle.
but this is slashdot. we use devices for everything but the intended purpose. play games on an xbox360? ha! we need to discuss important things like:
1) can i run linux on it?
2) can i build a beowulf cluster of them?
3) can i play illegally downloaded movies/music on it?
4) can i use it as an ssh proxy to connect to my file server hosted on a toaster running netbsd?
you know, things like that...
That's actually always been one of the problems games have had next to movies for realism. I mean films are still shot at 24fps. It's rare to play a game at less than 30fps, and many people insist on 60fps or more. Yet the film, despite it;s low frame rate, still has a smoothness that games don't. Why? Motion blur.
If you look at a game screenshot with lots of motion, everything is crystal clear. It's a snapshot of precisely what was happening at that given instant. It's like having a still photo with an infinetly fast shutter speed. If however you look at a movie frame with teh same kind of action, you'll notice it's heavily blurred. The camera is leaving the shutter open long enough to capture more than just a single instant.
Now the net effect, when played back is that the blurred scene looks more smooth. The faster something is moving, the more true this is. I mean let's say you have a game running at 30fps, and you have a rocket fly across the screen in just 3 frames. The way it will be rendered, without blur, will be with huge gaps inbetween. You'll see it on the left side, then the center, then the right, then gone. It looks jerky, cut up, unrealistic. However if that rocket were blurred as it moved, it would look more smooth and realistic to you.
Like any effect, it can be overused or used wrong, but blur can really enchance teh smoothness of images changing at high speeds.
Actually, this is no surprise at all.
When the original Xbox came out, it was actually better than what you could buy in PC graphics cards at the time. At launch, a console better be whooping ass, because after that's it's downhill! PC hardware gets updated, but the console hardware will stay the same for several years to come, during which it will not be top-notch anymore.
So yes, the xbox 360 will be pretty impressive graphics-wise for now, that's obvious. As a PC gamer you shouldn't despair, in a year or so, the Xbox360 high-tech equivalent hardware will be available at commodity prices (timespan may vary).
Plus, who'd want to give up that keyboard and mouse anyways... (my 2 cent)
Sure, all the hype is in place, and the X360 looks like a great platform... maybe I am just not paying attention, or have become jaded. But all my gaming friends are totally ambivalent on the X360. Some want to pick it up, most are going to wait and see what the PS3 is like, and in general there seems to be a collective shrug about the thing. Is it lack of Halo 3, or some really huge A-list title? Shouldn't be... the PS2 launched with basically SSX and Ridge Racer...
I dunno. There is some kind of elusive piece missing from the X360 launch to get me excited. I saw the posters for the pre-sale and thought Hey, I guess that IS out soon, huh.... I guess I'm just an old coot now. I play almost nothing but Warcraft these days, maybe that is it. :)
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
I think there is some serious "astroturfing" going on in this thread. Comments like yours, that are critical of the XBox, are being modded down as flamebait.
I've noticed the same thing as you, none of my friends are very excited about the 360. There doesn't seem to be much buzz surrounding it. Personally I think it is because all the games are just sequels, more of the same but with fancier graphics.
It will be interesting to see what happens when the Playstation3 comes out.
Interesting, all I hear online while in game lobbies between the games on XBC and KAI is how much people would run and buy it on the first day.
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.... and i think the old headset won't work either ....
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I have only 2 consoles (ps/2 & xbox) and only play a few hours a week, however I decided that I had to wait for PS3, see their relase titles first as I'm absolutely unhappy what I see about the xbox, and the games list leaves me uninterested
there is only one title that would interest me: the new Ghost Recon, but I won't buy a console for one game, and I am really pissed about all the crap I have to buy again to have a usable console
AV pack (again), hdd, wireless (if you want), remote control
Games: OK, they look good, but these screenshots are not as nice compared to what I saw on the sony presentation... OK, now 100s jump on me that they weren't playable demos, etc
I was really about getting one on the first week, but I started looking at all that, and just stepped back
I wait at least half a year and see who wins, I really do not want to end-up with 2 consoles like now, because one will be just sitting there untouched, now it is my ps2, next time it might be my 360, and it is 2x as much $$ to waste
Ignoring the fact that you can't pick a winner from "both sets of reviews" when it's only included in one of them...
The "games have to get nine out of ten to be worth playing" mentality bothers me. A lot. Scores are inflated to the point where they're almost meaningless anyway; even though Black and White was a good game, do you really think it would have been consistently rated at the 90% level if it wasn't so anticipated and so hyped? The 10/10 on PGR3 means jack except for it's the obligatory launch title that everyone is expected to buy with the console. What console hasn't launched with at least one game in the 9/10 or above range?
Personally, I know I'd have more fun with Kameo than I would PGR3. I've got racing games, and plenty of them. I'd much rather have an experience that's new instead of something that we see modified and released anew every six months in some form.
It's also a letdown to see how the scores are determined. Kameo was scored lower because it's only going to last "weeks, not months?" Give me a fucking break - weeks of entertainment for $50 is still pretty darn good, all things considered, and Kameo also seems to be one of the few 360 launch titles that has a plot of some kind. Apparently, that's become a bad thing.
Goo goo g'joob.
No, no love here either. But I'll go further and say I'm not feeling it from *any* of the consoles. The interest I have for the Revolution, based on its controller, is tempered by the fact that it seems the only other selling point is that it can play all the older games. Note to Nintendo: Retro gaming is cool, but not for very long. Yes it's fun to fire up Super Mario Brothers once in awhile, but I'm not going to slog through those games *again*.
But as far as the 360...PGR3 looks okay, I guess, but so does PGR2 and I'm not 1/3 of the way through that. To be fair, the same goes for GTA:SA...it's fun, but so was Vice City, and frankly I've moved on.
I'm beginning to think this new generation is the harbringer of some kind of gaming apocalypse...everybody, including nintendo, is pushing "more of the same" but with minor twists (better graphics, innovative controller). It's depressing when you look forward to the next systems for more of the same, but better!
Frankly, I see the only hope coming from giving away or making dev kits unbelievably cheap so that anyone and their dog can create a game and distribute it online (a la xbox live). Will a lot suck? Oh boy will they ever! But it's the only way any kind of innovation will happen, I think. But I guess as long as the big three get their royalties per disc, no one is going to care.
No one and I mean NO ONE has even the slightest interest in the 360.
Does anyone in the group you speak of own an HDTV? Very few comments on this article mention it, but for non HDTV owners, an Xbox 360 will be fairly unattractive. They have said they will release a VGA cable, so that may please you.
I don't know why they don't have native HDMI support, but they don't.
I did play a little of the 360 at Best Buy, King Kong looked *very* impressive. Jack Black was eerily realistic. A few weeks ago my interest in it was "I'll wait for a modchip" but now I'm on a "ooh eye candy for my HDTV!" kick.
I don't know how many of you have HD sets, but this may be the main source of sales for this thing in the first year.
--falz
I didn't realize that soccer players were so shiny.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
Here at GarageGames we have had XB360s since Alpha hardware. Currently, we have about eight dev-stations in place while we are finishing up Marble Blast Ultra for distribution through the Live Arcade feature of the system. I can tell you that with everything that I know about the system, I will be the first in line at Best Buy to get my own system for home. Here's why.
I could care less about processors or GPU's, but even if I did the XB360 is great in this area. But, it is everywhere else that the system shines even brighter. The wireless controller feels JUST RIGHT, and I can finally sit on my couch and play games on my HD television (which has precious few other HD signals where I live). No other wireless controller in history, other than Wavebird for Gamecube, has felt right. This time MS nailed it.
If I'm not feeling like I want to play game, I can easily plug my iPod into the front of the system and listen to my music. Currently, I'm not much of a techie, so I listen to my music by plugging my iPod into one of those cheesy little self powered speaker systems. This might not impress the Slashdot crowd, but I don't care enough about this kind of thing to take even five minutes to figure out which input, which cable, etc. it takes to hook up to my myriad amps, etc. to make it work.
Live Arcade downloadable games are the biggest thing that will make this system a hit. Being able to sit on my couch, and choose from hundreds of games without going to the store is a HUGE WIN. Many other things such as transferrable memory cards that allow "roaming" so you can take your downloaded games to a friend's house, micropayments so you can easily buy add-ons to your game (or allowing parents to give their kids purchasing power) all add up to a system that is light years ahead of current systems.
Microsoft has done so many things right with this system that we continue to be amazed.
Jeff Tunnell
www.garagegames.com Independent Games
You miss the point. I had my XBMC set up in three hours. It can play just about any media, has digital audio out, hooks up to my TVs component inputs (and has done since it came out). Say a weeks work to produce something similar using off-the-shelf components? And at what cost? I've never even seen a video card with component-out that'll work in UK TVs. (we've always had RGB component inputs).
Also, you miss something MAJOR that most who undertake making a media pc miss out. The user interface. With the xbox, the UI is designed for the device. The remote control works out the box. No need to assign buttons to an existing remote, and "hack" buttons that don't exist on your remote. No "menu" button? Well, I'll use the "1" for that. No "display" button, guess I'll put that on "2" then. With XBMC the UI is specifically designed for the hardware, and it works beautifully. It has a better UI than ANY media device I've seen. Seriously, it's the dogs bollocks. The standard hardware is one of the things that benefits games developers, and guess what...it applies here too.
It's small, fits under the telly and it's cheap. I update it every other month and I am always pleasanly surprised by the new functionality they add. Last month it was an Apple website browser (lot's of quicktime media) as well as an iFilm browser. Watching streaming media to your TV over the net from the confort of your armchair? Bah, that's old news for us, and now we have a massive library to watch.
The only thing it doesn't do is TIVO style recording HOWEVER that's doable. It can display streams over the network, so all you need is a centralised PC doing the recording. And in essence this is a far superiour solution, as you can buy additional xbox "clients" for pennies now and watch the media in ANY room.
You really don't know what you are missing. Every tech-head who has seen my (cheap) setup now has one.
There was a reason to buy the first xbox since it was somewhat more advanced than highend pcs. I can't see any reason why someone would waste 400 dollars on a 360.
The first Xbox was sub-par compared to top-end PCs at the time. I always buy in the midrange, yet my PC could stomp the original xbox when it was released. Of course the xbox advocates would say that the xbox is tuned, and doesn't have all the inefficient generalized software that a PC needs, and so on, and perhaps they are right.
However a triple-core, "hyperthreaded" (e.g. 6 virtual processors) 3.2GhzX3 PowerPC with an incredible memory bus is decidedly superior to most PCs. Add that with a top-end video processor, and you have an incredibly capable system. I'm not a console gamer, but I am drawn to the technical capabilities of that machine, and I have no doubt that there'll be hacks to stick it into cluster configurations very quickly.
The xbox360 is a killer, killer, killer machine. The only reason there isn't a lot of hype is because Microsoft has suppressed virtually all info about it, and has done close to nothing to promote it (at least up until now). Perhaps they're planning on a shock and awe campaign to sell it, but the lack of enthusiasm is entirely in their court.
For those geeks that need a reason to purchase this thing (outside the games), here's some stuff to note:
1.) Practically any hardware works with it. People have plugged USB keyboards, iPods, digital cameras, etc into the thing and everything has been recognized so far. Even some PC controllers and steering wheels work. It's a very Mac-like hardware experience.
2.) Like Windows Media Center, the Xbox 360 will play saved, unencrypted DVDs off a file server somewhere. The only catch is that Windows Media Center needs to be on that box (or connected to that box) to share out the movies. I have a "DVD jukebox" server with Windows Media Center that currently dishes out 50 movies on my TV. I can move that to the basement and just have my Xbox 360 now.
3.) MS has pulled off a seemingly impossible feat of emulation in getting Xbox games to run. Not only have they emulated Intel to Power PC, but nVidia assembly to ATI. Better yet, the software for that emulation is updated constantly and will be released on their website to burn to CD. Can anyone say "reverse engineering"?
4.) The 360 has some fairly cool gamer features that'll make people say "why hasn't this been done before"? For example: universal settings. You like your games set to Difficult mode and controller's Y-axis updown for shooters? Set it into the dashboard and it gets applied universally.
5.) Numerous other bits of geek happiness: VGA, an impressive fab of the boards to fit that "squeezed" shape, that power brick (well, maybe not the power brick -- that thing sucks).
All in all, I was waiting on buying this thing based on the Perfect Dark reviews. Now I'm considering getting one just based on the hardware. If nothing else, it'll be fun to rip apart a 3-core Power PC board.
That's actually always been one of the problems games have had next to movies for realism. I mean films are still shot at 24fps. It's rare to play a game at less than 30fps, and many people insist on 60fps or more. Yet the film, despite it;s low frame rate, still has a smoothness that games don't. Why? Motion blur.
Playing a game a 24fps is a terrible experience but movies seem mostly ok at that. As far as I know the reason for this is not motion blur, but evenly distributed frames. In a movie you get 24 solid evenly spaced frames a second, whereas in a game the rate is constantly changing. Even if nothing much was happening and the counter stayed at 24fps it would probably be unevenly distributed....hmmm how to say this....the eye percieves changes in frame rate as well as the frame rate itself. Also some of the (time) gaps between two frames could be quite large (and quite small other times relative to the average) in the game so this will be noticeable.
This guy are sick.
I expected the XBox 260 to be a really smooth console.
Nah - you're thinking of the Xbox 360. The 260 was a piece of shit.
I'm interested but:
:)+
-This generation I'm married with kids, so dumping $700 ish into a system aint going to happen!
-I realize I can buy this for much cheaper in a few years with more games
-My PC is at least somewhat up to date reducing the need for the 360
-Oblivion is delayed anyways
"Kameo is a game that will last players weeks but not months," as mentioned in the Closing Comments section.
And if you've got the time to play games for more than two hours a day, more power to you. I know that my lifestyle is different - I'm a college student with very little free time - but even then, I'd be perfectly content with a shorter game if the experience is a good one. Beyond Good and Evil and Max Payne come to mind...
Goo goo g'joob.
Why would you buy a system for PC ports? If you want PC games, isn't it wiser to just use your PC for them?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
I'm asking because I simply do not know.
Is the "motion blur" of 24fps movies added in post processing, inherent to the camera in original filming, or a combination of the two.
I'm also not a gamer, but being a geek I like the technology that goes into the newer games. I may very well buy a PS3 if I get unpissed at Sony. 2 HDTV outs, digital sound, absolutely sick looking screenshots, cell processors, looks neat. I'm curious about the blur in games. Why does that not exist? Would it take more processing to produce the blur than to just throw out more frames?
The motion blur in film is for the same reason that you would get a blur on any still picture of something that is moving fast - the amount of time the film is exposed is large enough to capture multiple locations of the object. This would lead to a blurred picture of the original object, as nothing moves in exact jumps to be captured by film without blurring.
The problem with blur in games is the fact that computers know the exact positions of the objects and do the calculations based on that. The general thinking for gaming used to be to get the most clarity, the most details that you can for an object from the hardware and do that at highest frame rate. However that results in very crisp, but as GP said unrealistic, pictures. Adding more frames doesn't really help because they are still too sharp. On the other hand, to create a blur in games requires calculations involving more than just positions of objects and their polygons in one frame, but the locations of them in previous frames. That means that your memory requirements have grown for something that used to be considered the anticedent of perfection - non-crispness.
Xbox360 looks cool and all, but if Sony will allow us to develop with 1-2 Cells in Linux on the PS3 unmodded, they just got one buyer.
I'm a pretty heavy gamer (8-12 hours a week), but would never buy a dedicated machine for it. But the specs on the PS3 are way to good to pass up. Seeing most of my programming work these days revolves around video editing, the PS3 sounds to good to pass up. Get a Cell machine and a killer gaming console, all in one for
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
It's inherent to the film and camera itself.
At 24 fps, the camera shutter will be open for (don't know the exact number) 1/30 of a second each frame, and any motion that occurs during the time the shutter is open will appear on the film as a blur. It's the same blur effect as when you use a slow shutter speed to take a picture of fast action. When viewed as part of a sequence of moving pictures, your mind interprets the blur as a moving object.
Games try to emulate this effect with motion blur, since the alternative of using instantaneous pictures can be visually jarring. I suspect (don't know) that motion blur does take more processing power than just throwing out more frames, but the end result looks much better to a human observer.
Jeez, not only are you unable to read other peoples posts, you seen to have been living under a rock for the past couple of years:
image. (found via google image search for "get a brain morans", repeat the search if this site dies).
I wonder if you are the guy in the picture...your probably related at least.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nice NDA's the review sites had to sign.. not a single actual gameplay screenshot! (from a sensible camera angle anyway) I suppose that's because from afar the graphics look exactly the same as they did on the old systems.. blocky and unsharp due to the low resolution.
Ok, find a WalMart... Yes they are almost everywhere, I can even give you directions to one in Germany.
Find the XBox 360 Kiosk that has been there for almost a month now, and play the games for yourself.
Trust me, at times, if you aren't the one playing you would swear it was a cut scene or a real film, when it is the actual game. Most people walking by think it is a film or at the very least a pre-rendered cut scene, when it is the actually game, running smooth with tons of AI and action surrounding you.
Even though us average SlashDot people don't want to hear this, but the reality is the real XBox 360 meets everything E3 promised, and since the boxes are faster and do nice anti-aliasing, the games are smoother and look even better than the E3 demos running on dual G5s with dual Video.
PS3 will have a hard time matching the game quality, not only does the 360 do graphics and sound right, but there is enough processing power left over for an intelligent game and lots of side and ambient action.
Especially considering the PS3 went from being a Cell only system, then to a Cell and NVidia system when the Cell couldn't be adapted fast enough to do the quality of video they wanted, and now we are finding out the PS3's NVidia subsystem is in the 6800 Class of PC Cards, not even the current 7800s.
The Video in the XBox 360 is based on ATI technologies we won't see in PC Video cards until at least the second Quarter of next year.
So you can basically match the processing and GPU power of PS3 with current PC hardware, where it would be hard to match processing and GPU power of the XBox 360 at this point without some serious coin and tweaking. Not bad for 300-400 US.
Reviewing the review...
The first Project Gotham 3 review begins with a diatribe all about the reviewer and not at all about the game. Why must writers make all their work about themselves? It's like the writer thinks we want to hear about him, and he must segue into a discussion of the game itself only by explaining how the game is directly relative to the main topic: himself.
Does this help us? Can we relate to the author in a way that tells us we'll have a similar game experience? Or are these boring "making the game personal" descriptions just an indication of how much the review, when he gets to it, will be biased?
I lost interest after reading too much about the author. I preferred to complain about it rather than continue bothering to read. I suppose this is because I have some sort of attention deficit. Ever since I was in fourth grade, when... (me me me, etc)
I was excited to read the review. I couldn't wait to hear what EA added. What extra features did they give to add value to the inevitible $60 price tag?
WTF! They left out instant replay?!?! They cut out the mini-camp?!?! They trimmed down the defensive audibles?!?!
I have to say I'm quite disappointed. Realistically, though, EA had to fit all those fancy shmancy graphics on a regular "old" sized DVD, and I think the game suffered because of it. Hopefully MS can switch to a "next gen" DVD format soon, or we might be seeing scaled back games in the future. In my opinion this game should have a lower price tag at launch. For one, it's less "game" than the other versions, and two it's halfway through the NFL season.
Trust me, at times, if you aren't the one playing you would swear it was a cut scene or a real film, when it is the actual game.
Funny, I've been playing the latest PC games and played the Xbox 360 demos and I sure as hell wouldn't "swear it was a cut scene or a real film" (!?!?). In fact, the most visually impressive game I've played recently is F.E.A.R., a PC title which is graphically far superior to the 360 demos on display.
Most people walking by think it is a film or at the very least a pre-rendered cut scene, when it is the actually game, running smooth with tons of AI and action surrounding you.
"Most people" must be looking at a completely different console than the xbox 360 I've seen. "Most people" must also be different than the people I've talked to, who were thoroughly unimpressed with the graphics (which for the demo games look like Xbox1 titles in a higher res).
Even though us average SlashDot people don't want to hear this, but the reality is the real XBox 360 meets everything E3 promised,
E3 didn't exactly promise much... Exactly what great-looking 360 games were shown at E3? All I remember are Gears of War (which is still a long way from release) and PGR3, which ironically turned out to be prerendered and the final game does not look nearly as good (minimal anti-aliasing, lower than 720p res, etc.)
and since the boxes are faster and do nice anti-aliasing, the games are smoother and look even better than the E3 demos running on dual G5s with dual Video.
None of the demos use any significant amount of anti-aliasing. As for comparing them to the E3 stuff? Most of it looked like garbage, so I would hope they would look better!
PS3 will have a hard time matching the game quality, not only does the 360 do graphics and sound right, but there is enough processing power left over for an intelligent game and lots of side and ambient action.
Are you a Microsoft Employee reading this off an advertising brochure?
Especially considering the PS3 went from being a Cell only system,
Where exactly did you get this? The PS3 has always been Cell + RSX. Anything else is Xbox fanboy speculation.
then to a Cell and NVidia system when the Cell couldn't be adapted fast enough to do the quality of video they wanted, and now we are finding out the PS3's NVidia subsystem is in the 6800 Class of PC Cards, not even the current 7800s.
This is completely FALSE. I can't believe how garbage like this could get modded +4 interesting.
The Video in the XBox 360 is based on ATI technologies we won't see in PC Video cards until at least the second Quarter of next year.
Oh yes, ATI has magically created an Uber GPU that you claim is superior to NVidia's yet somehow their latest top of the line, $600 PC card is still inferior in performance to NVidia's 7800 (which is a basis for the PS3's GPU). But we know that miracles happen in Xbox fanboy land!
So you can basically match the processing and GPU power of PS3 with current PC hardware, where it would be hard to match processing and GPU power of the XBox 360 at this point without some serious coin and tweaking. Not bad for 300-400 US.
You can match the power of the PS3 and even more so the Xbox 360 with current PC hardware with ease, unless you are gullible enough to believe the bullshit Teraflops-of-computing-power claims from both Sony and MS.
My point is you can buy a computer with the same if not better hardware specs for the same price as the xbox
Where? I looked on NewEgg and Pricewatch and I was unable to find a computer that retails for as little as the XBox. The cheapest computer I could find on Pricewatch that had somewhat comparable specs was $208.99 (plus $65 for the cheapest vid card with TV out, plus $20 more if you want a DVD drive [like the XBox]) and the case doesn't look nearly as nice in an AV rack. If you want a nice low profile case you will probably spend $50-$100 more. Then you will need to buy at least 1 game controller/joystick and a remote/IR receiver, probably the bare minimum for those items is $30 each. That's getting pretty spendy for "the same price as the xbox".
and then you aren't limited to one os.
Since when is the XBox limited to one OS? I run Linux with MythTV on the 3 XBoxes in my home, but there is also the option to run XBMC or the standard MS Xbox OS. In addition to being a decent computer for multimedia playback, it also plays XBox games! Can your fictional $100 computer do that?
The XBox makes a serviceable multimedia playback machine that integrates well with existing AV components. Prior to using XBoxes for my MythTV frontends I used computers and the setup pains (and price) were greater with the PCs. Granted, it has been more than a year since I purchased an XBox, but when I was pricing components for my MythTV system the XBox was by far the most cost-effective frontend.
Enigma
And I guess you don't understand much about video cards
I don't. Most people don't. I don't know what components or DVI or HDMI or all that shit means. I just want to plug in a box and be done with it. Leave the technical stuff to the geeks.
My point is you can buy a computer with the same if not better hardware specs for the same price as the xbox
Where? Xboxes are pretty cheap. Who is selling a ready-made, off the shelf computer which is as small, easy to use and convient as an Xbox, for the same price as an xbox?
and then you aren't limited to one os
Who gives a shit? I mean, other than hardcore hackers? People who want to watch films and what not don't give a shit about OSes, they probably don't even know what one is, and they don't need to. Come into the real world.
and it offers no price benefit once you realize just what a slow ass p.o.s. the xbox is.
Slow? As in it plays films in slow motion or something? Do games run at half speed?