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Hardcore Offer Mixed Verdict At Xbox 360 Zero Hour

Posted by Zonk on from the long-night dept.

News for nerds writes "Next Generation magazine runs a quick report for the Xbox 360 Zero Hour launch event. According to avid Xbox fans joining the party in Mojave Desert, while games to be released in mid 2006 such as Gears of War and Ninety Nine Nights got positive reviews, the initial offers on 360 couldn't impress them as much." Kotaku has a pair of photo essays from the event.

3 of 24 comments (clear)

  1. Lack of launch title quality = hype by the+computer+guy+nex · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I've personally played Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, and Call of Duty2. Without even touching the rest (including PGR3 which is receiving near perfect reviews) this is easily the best release lineup for a modern console.

    The goal of a release lineup is to have enough games up front to be worth the early investment. There have been people lined up since before noon today at my local Best Buy - so I think the 360 has gone above and beyond that.

    1. Re:Lack of launch title quality = hype by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Quality wise I would agree with you that there are more games at a reasonable quality being released for the 360 than any other recently released system; at the same time I would say that the XBox 360's line-up is pathetic display when it comes to variety. Microsoft has brought several good first person shooters (Quake 4, Perfect Dark Zero, etc.), and some good racing games (PGR3, Ridge Racer, Need For Speed) but is there anything special beyond that?

      The fact is that I have never seen such a ridgid line-up; if you can play 3 first person shooters or 3 racing games at the same time the system is probably great for you. There is nothing that even comes close to apealing to anyone except for current hard core XBox fans. Microsoft may want to lead the market but they have shown no capability to do so, to sell 100 Million units and have the 'Billion' users they want they will first need to produce and attract games that apeal to more than the 15-25 year old insecure male market.

  2. second person perspective? by kaptron · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The graphics were dazzling, better than anything on the show floor. The second person style gameplay looked equally as exciting.

    I haven't heard much about Gears of War (other than "OMG ITS GONNA BE AWSUMM!!!") but I'm assuming they meant third person perspective. Second person perspective is a narrative form that is pretty much already assumed while you are playing any video game.

    Other launch titles didn't seem to impress gamers much. Tony Hawk: American Wasteland was barely touched and Sega's Condemned didn't have many players either. After a while, Kameo started to bring in a crowd of gamers who curiously watched, but didn't actually try the game out.

    I found it interesting that people would go to this xbox 360 zero hour event and not even bother playing these launch titles... I mean, Condemned or Kameo may not have looked groundbreaking; but if I was at the event, I would have at least played them, as opposed to just curiously watching. Maybe that's just me. Not that I am at all surprised that the general summary of people's initial reactions to some of these titles was "same game, better graphics". Hopefully games like Gears of War and 99 Nights live up to being worthwhile games, I'm curious what the first batch of good (read: not just pretty) next gen games will be like.