XBOX 360

SimpleMinded said:
Also, Rosh, not sure if you were talking about the 360 or not but the games on the 360 are 60 bucks a pop, not 50 :).
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I stand corrected, then. :D

Back to what I was saying about the genres:
And for consoles, nothing says "Let's play Who Can Memorize the Map Better" better than split-screen play. I became unbeatable at Goldeneye at my BEQ because I couldn't help but see where everyone else was through peripheral vision. That is not fun!
 
At this point there is very little reason to buy a 360. There is a good chance the price will go down when PS3 is released, and if nothing else they will be readily available and maybe have changed manufacturing practices to reduce the occurence of slowdowns. In the meanwhile, they are still releasing plenty of Xbox games and the PC has a few gems, too.

Also, its unlikely that the current "console war" is going to drive people to make PC games. Exactly the opposite. PC games are a largely western industry, and virtually unheard of in Japan (excluding adult titles, those sick bastards). But once Microsoft jumped on board, they could use their tradition ties to PC developers to lure them into making Xbox games or co-releases much easier then Sony. Thats why you saw so many games that being codeveloped for the two systems. And Microsoft has something of an incentive to discourage PC gaming, since they get more money through their X-box. And all console manufacturers are trying to lure developers to their camp with minimal barriers to publishing.

The best thing for PC gaming would be Microsoft getting out of the console industry and one giant dominating, preferably Nintendo who gets along lousy with third party developers anyways. The winner would probably crank up the console fees or find other ways to make it more costly for developers to create games on their platforms. This would encourage more developers to support the PC, which doesn't have the same barriers to releasing games on it as consoles do. I think gamers go where the games are, and if thats the PC, there they'll be.

I think the industry is ready for some sort of shake up. As graphical standards rise, the cost of developing games is skyrocketing. That means no one is taking any risks, and a lot of companies are collapsing under the pressure of needing to sell several hundred thousands of copies. I suspect we'll see a lot of developers give up trying to keep up with the graphics race, and focus instead on new and innovative gameplay. Hopefully, it will work. Sort of like My Big Fat Greek Wedding succeeding, dispite sitcom quality lighting and backdrops.
 
thought this was interesting on joystiq:

As reported by Dow Jones last night based upon a presentation at the CSFB Annual Technology Conference, the 40,000 unit figure has left pundits flabbergasted. If launch supply estimates from American Technology Research are accurate, that would mean that 10% of all Xbox 360 consoles sold in the US were either sold or resold through eBay.

Exactly what's to be done about the reselling and marking up (or as some rumors would have it, the direct sale of units from some unscrupulous retailers and/or distributors) is completely unknown. Microsoft certainly can't take action against resales and tracking diverted goods from legitimate channels is difficult at best.

It's probably fair to say that eBay will continue to be a channel that's exploited by people at every hardware launch. About the only solution is to provide so much stock at launch that the opportunities for markup are fairly slim (and we all know that's never going to happen).
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40,000 xboxes sold on ebay... lordie, ebay's probably the highest supplier of xboxes selling 10% of all of them :-D. i especially like that some retailers decided not to sell in store and instead simply went straight to ebay :)
 
We still have a few (three or four) unsold Xbox360 in a local store, if someone wants one we can negociate, for a small fee of course :twisted:

Why does Call of Duty2 looks less pretty on the box compared to my comp?... i hope that´s a problem of that particular game, if not that would be really disapointing.
 
http://www.gamespot.com/features/6140621/index.html

Gamespot did some pics of games on xbox and their counterpart on the 360 and I don't know, most of them don't look much different (while it is without HD I still wonder). As for Call of Duty 2, I've heard that a lot of the XBox 360 games that are also on the computer tend to look/run better on the PC. Not sure if this's been confirmed or not though.
 
One of my friends was in Seattle on business recently and took a tour of Microsoft to try out the 360. I asked him how the graphics compared to my comp, he said that on an HDTV they were better no contest, without it they didn't look much different from the regular Xbox. Regular tv's can't match the resolution of a computer monitor so you really aren't going to get the full effect of a 360 with one (according to him, at least).

Edit: Just realized, the 'great graphics' thing could just be the result of seeing it on a tv that is roughly 4 times the display area of a regular monitor.
 
Gamespot did some pics of games on xbox and their counterpart on the 360 and I don't know, most of them don't look much different (while it is without HD I still wonder). As for Call of Duty 2, I've heard that a lot of the XBox 360 games that are also on the computer tend to look/run better on the PC. Not sure if this's been confirmed or not though.
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That's to be expected really. Keep in mind that the 360 is still very early in its life-cycle, and there will be significant improvements in graphics in the next few years. As was the case with Xbox, PS2 and GameCube. Graphics aside, what I find to be a let down is that the games are more of the same but with better graphics. When you find that games almost 10 years old give you more than the recent block-buster on any platform, there has to be something wrong with the industry.
 
Ivy Mike said:
That's to be expected really. Keep in mind that the 360 is still very early in its life-cycle, and there will be significant improvements in graphics in the next few years. As was the case with Xbox, PS2 and GameCube.
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See, this is what bothers me. People are spending 3 grand on this system when all the games and everything are really not that different than their counterparts on the xbox. Why people why!?
 
Wow, you hear the sounds the machine was making? sounds like a friggin dinosaur :). I'd be smashing the damned thing on the spot if it did that to my games.
 
SimpleMinded said:
Wow, you hear the sounds the machine was making? sounds like a friggin dinosaur :). I'd be smashing the damned thing on the spot if it did that to my games.
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It will if you flip it...
 
If you did what they do in the clip (turn the console while it's spinning the disc) than your game would be ruined. What didn't you get?
 
... I don't understand then why they did that. If it wasn't to prove a point with the xbox 360 I'm at a loss for the purpose behind the demonstration :).
 
I suppose the purpose is that the XBox 360 is not very well designed. That if you have it standing upright, and it falls over while you are playing a game on the console (I've seen this happen with PS2s before, but with no permanent damage); that game will be ruined. It certainly doesn't look like a good design to me, having the system destroy disks so easily.
 
Actually, any machine will do that, unless they have something to lock the disk in place. However, such designs cost money, and obviously, since the X-Boxes are not supposed to be moved while being used (they've got a huge power supply and wireless controllers), it'd mostly be a waste of money.

Frankly, it's mentioned clearly in the user manual that moving the X-Box while it's being used can damage the DVD, so if you still start moving it around, it's just your own dumb fault.
 
Ah... this is certainly a good time for console haters like me. I just hope PS2 will suck as badly as XBox 360. :D
 
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