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11 Design Mistakes of the Xbox 360
An anonymous reader writes "FiringSquad.com has posted an article discussing 11 design flaws of the Xbox 360, ranging from gaming to Xbox Live Marketplace issues." From the article: "Mistake #2: No MSN Music - I'm as much of a fan of DRM as everyone else (which is to say I don't like it), but with Microsoft already charging gamers for Xbox Live Gold support, it would have been possible for Microsoft to offer discount service "bundles" allowing you to buy unlimited subscriptions to the MSN Music library at rates less than you would have to pay for Napster or Rhapsody. Gamers would have had an opportunity to get music cheaper and add one extra weapon in the console battle against Sony." I'm not so sure some of these are that big a deal. I'm more than a little glad the 360 has no web browser.
Personally, the only reasons I would own a console are a) if they didn't release some uber-game for the PC, or my computer wouldn't be able to run it for years, and b) consoles just work, in general. You don't get crash bugs because you don't have the right version of video card drivers. You don't lose all the music in the game because you have an unsupported sound card. I've only EVER seen two consoles fail, my roommate's Gamecube for some bug in the specific one he owned (mine never did that), and that was with only one game, and then one time with my old dreamcast, when I fell through the floor in one part of Sonic Adventure.
However, PCs tend to be much more moddable, so it usually balances out. Stuff doesn't crash and explode often enough for it to be a problem for me, and I've never gotten hardware that just randomly didn't work with something (except when the linux kernel driver for my mobo sound stopped working, but that got fixed eventually...)
"Quoting yourself is stupid." -Me
Why is the author even trying to venture a guess into the overheating problems of the 360? He makes wild assumptions about what's going on inside and then ventures some random "20% increase in fan speed" as to the fix of it. Unless you have a spec sheet in front of you, don't try and make an "educated" guess about things like this.
I haven't had one crash with my 360 related to the heating of it. I had a scratch on my PDZ disc that caused it to freeze up, but got a new copy and everything's been clear sailing since. Saying there have been constant problems is a little bit unfounded. If there was something *seriously* wrong with the console, they would have recalled it a long while ago. Maybe MS's 3% figure is a little low, but it's not 99% like the author wants to believe...
Tim Dorr
Owner/Manger
A Small Orange
Gee, only 11?
Actually, there's only one.
The X-Box 360 clearly has heat management issues in some models (not most, but the early scuttlebut seems to be that it's more than one would expect.)
The author goes on some weird rant, based on the one and only 360 he has access to, speculating that other people's reports about overheating power supplied must be bullshit because his problem happened to seem to be with the CPU and/or graphics card.
So, why 10 more "problems"?
So you will have to load 10 more pages to read this useless "article." Nobody gives a fuck that there's not web browser built in to this game console (just like there's none in any other major console on the market), but you will need to load ad after ad to discover that such nitpicks are the best this joker can come up with.
Pathetic.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a 360, and won't unless or until there's a better selection of games available for it.)
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
How is this MSN music thing the author mentions a DESIGN flaw?
After all, it could be added to XBOX 360's via an update if MS decided to do it. I figure many things will be added over the lifespan of the 360.
Mistake #11: No pressure sensitive face buttons
I disagree this is a mistake. Most games don't make use of this feature because for the user, there is little feedback regarding what is going on. How exactly do I push the face button half-way down? 1/4 way? All the way? I can't, really. I can just mash it with my thumb, and hope that I am getting what I want.
Surprise!
You mean Microsoft didn't include the features they easily could have, but which someone might argue would cut into their Windows XP Media Center Edition/Xbox 360 Media Center upgrade market?
I'm shocked and stunned.
Microsoft actually tends to do the opposite with their platforms. Office is sort-of a compatability miscreant(and it's all backwards compatable).
It causes all sorts of problems, because tons of legacy stuff is supported across OS versions and patches for exactly that. You could still run almost all DOS stuff as late as Windows 98. You can still run 95/98 stuff on 2k/XP. Etc. Etc.
The key to the enjoyment of pop music is to replace any instance of "love" with "C.H.U.D."
Ok, and those launches aren't really all that great. Sure, it's a smaller launch but everybody loves to act like the PS2 launched with MGS 2, FFX and GTA 3. The launch games weren't really significant, and the 360 compares more favorably when the Xbox Live arcade is taken into account, a feat many seem incapable of acheiving...
Also, other launches are more successful because they don't have the MS logo anywhere near them. The stigma of the Xbox being a PC just because it had the same parts was such a huge argument it's scary, and all the while Sony was almost completely PC-centric when designing the PS2.
"This is considered plagiarism."