XBOX 360

[Spanky The Dolphin]

The risk we've known from the Microsoft declaration of being first by such a large degree has been the chance they'll be This Gen + .5, not Next Gen. But it's a little early to ring the doom bells on that.

Meh, I'll go ahead and flat-out declare that the 360 is really just a 6.5 rather than a full Seventh Generation console. Everything I've seen and read doesn't seem to indicate that much is there under the hood.

[Durandal]

I saw Perfect Dark Zero on the 360, but it wasn't on an HD display. (It was actually on a projector.) Frankly, meh. Maybe it has to be in HD to really be impressive.

[Stark]

The HD thing is hilarious to mention to AU console whores: HD TVs are pretty expensive here, and fucked if I know anyone who's got one. So the magical cost:coolness ratio dies in the ass when you have to buy a AU$4,500 television.

Is it unusual that everything I've read about the 360 post-launch is bad? I mean, on comedy sites, tech sites, here, chatting to people in the US... it really doesn't seem to be worth the running gun battles people went though to buy one.

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

This is no different from any other launch, really. When the PS2 launched, there weren't any games that were particularly impressive or that couldn't have been done on the PS1 with slightly worse graphics, but looking back, nobody would say that the PS2 doesn't deserve to be called a full generation ahead of the PS1. Any pronouncements about it being only a half generation ahead are seriously jumping the gun, IMO.

[Stark]

This is no different from any other launch, really. When the PS2 launched, there weren't any games that were particularly impressive or that couldn't have been done on the PS1 with slightly worse graphics, but looking back, nobody would say that the PS2 doesn't deserve to be called a full generation ahead of the PS1. Any pronouncements about it being only a half generation ahead are seriously jumping the gun, IMO.

Oh most of it isn't launch-game bashing (although it exists). You're right though, launch hysteria always leaves this kind of disappointing afterglow.

[Hamel]

Financially impossible or unwise as it may be, the consoles would have been better off with more RAM instead of stripped down lol360millioncore CPUs. I'm merely dissapointed with 512 megs, and I almost shit myself when it looked like 360 was only getting 256. Nintendo could get away with 512 or lower considering they want to run at no more than 480p, but that isn't enough for an HD console. It's all about video memory.

There's not much 360 and PS3 can do except offer better 3d graphics, so what they should have done is made the leap so monstrously huge that no self-proclaimed video gaming expert could honestly make jabs along the lines of Xbox1.5, etc.

[Xon]

The HD thing is hilarious to mention to AU console whores: HD TVs are pretty expensive here, and fucked if I know anyone who's got one. So the magical cost:coolness ratio dies in the ass when you have to buy a AU$4,500 television.

$4500 is damn cheap for a good hd TV around here(Perth, WA). I'm planning on hooking an Xbox360 to my nice 19" monitor and running it a some HD resolution, much better than any HD TV I could afford to buy.

Is it unusual that everything I've read about the 360 post-launch is bad? I mean, on comedy sites, tech sites, here, chatting to people in the US... it really doesn't seem to be worth the running gun battles people went though to buy one.

It will be 2nd of March before the Xbox360 is released here. I'm hoping they sortout the damn shortage problems by then.

[Uraniun235]

The HD thing is hilarious to mention to AU console whores: HD TVs are pretty expensive here, and fucked if I know anyone who's got one. So the magical cost:coolness ratio dies in the ass when you have to buy a AU$4,500 television.

Jesus, you Australians just get reamed when it comes to technology, don't you?

[SirNitram]

The HD thing is hilarious to mention to AU console whores: HD TVs are pretty expensive here, and fucked if I know anyone who's got one. So the magical cost:coolness ratio dies in the ass when you have to buy a AU$4,500 television.

Jesus, you Australians just get reamed when it comes to technology, don't you?

If we knew withholding toilets would lead to this, we wouldn't have been half as tyrannical.

[Hotfoot]

If we knew withholding toilets would lead to this, we wouldn't have been half as tyrannical.

It's okay. At the time, it was thought that the evil magical powers of the inmates made the toilets swirl the other way, and more of these ivory altars strengthed their arcane powers. Now we just know it's because they're backwards.

[Darth Wong]

So if you spend $400 on an XBox and another five grand on an HDTV, you can finally achieve high-resolution gaming. Add a big hard drive and a keyboard and you might be able to match a PC, except that you can't run anything but games on it.

[LordShaithis]

Meh, I'll go ahead and flat-out declare that the 360 is really just a 6.5 rather than a full Seventh Generation console. Everything I've seen and read doesn't seem to indicate that much is there under the hood.

You know who always jumped in early with a console that turned out to be inferior in the long run? Sega. Just saying.

Anyway, are we counting Pong and whatnot as the first generation of consoles? Because if we start counting from the Atari 2600, this would be the sixth generation coming out now.

EDIT: Found an interesting article HERE.

It lists seven generations of consoles, running from the earliest Pong machines up to the generation now passing, making this upcoming one the eighth. But they count the brief era of Colecovision versus Atari 5200 as the third generation, two systems that aren't particularly well-remembered and were more or less staked through the heart by the crash of '82 anyway.

[Praxis]

That difference is because the 360 adds AA 4x to Halo 1 and 2 and most of the older games that actually run, right?

It adds what?

It smooths the jagged lines.

Now, we have games like King Kong getting a facelift and being republished as next-gen. Has this ever happened in the past? I can't recall PS2 having PS1 games with facelifts, but maybe I wasn't aware of them. Have there ever been dual launches in the past (games that come out for both PS1 and PS2, N64 and GameCube, SNES and N64, SNES and NES, etc)?

The EA Sports games, I believe. Madden NFL 2002, to be specific, was released on PS1, N64, PS2, GC, and Xbox.

Interesting.


But the difference between this
Playstation


and Playstation 2


is so great that I think they're completely different games under the same titles.


Anyway, compare that to the difference between King Kong for XBox:



And King Kong for the XBox 360
Inlined Image


is nowhere near so striking.


If that image is too large for anybody, post and I'll remove it (looks fine on my screen but I have a very high resolution).

[The Kernel]

That's hardly a fair comparison at all and you know it. Kong was ported from current gen consoles to the X360, it was not only not designed for it but it was not even designed with next gen consoles in mind.

[Nephtys]

That's hardly a fair comparison at all and you know it. Kong was ported from current gen consoles to the X360, it was not only not designed for it but it was not even designed with next gen consoles in mind.

It's not quite fair to judge from launch titles the capability of a system. As we know, usually when things go late is when you can see the true difference. Hell. Compare Resident Evil 4 to 2. That's a huge leap. If you're comparing a sprite game to 3D, of course that's a change too. This isn't revolutionary, but it's not half bad either. It turns the console from equivilent to a low end gaming PC equivilent to a bit past current high end ones.

[Praxis]

That's what I'm talking about though.

Never in the past has a game been able to be "upgraded" and pass for the low end of next generation.

IGN gives King Kong a 8.5/10 for graphics on the 360. GameSpot gives it an 8/10. A game ported from current gen consoles, with some minor tweaks, is given a higher score than some games designed ground-up for next gen. This could never happen in the past; a PSOne game with visual tweaks on the PS2 would be either labeled a classic game, or be laughed at.

But today, games can be up-ported and pass for next gen.

And yes, of course I know King Kong is below par for what we can expect to see out of the 360. In all likelyhood, it is single threaded or mostly single threaded, and not designed to take advantage of the special features of Xenos (the unified architecture, EDRAM, etc).

[LordShaithis]

Welcome to the future. Four years from now you'll have retards standing out in the snow to buy the Xbox 720 because, get out your magnifying glasses, Madden 2010 has even slightly less jagged lines than before! OMG YAY!!1!

Edit: To elaborate, the "next generation" no longer seems like a next generation. It just seems like... a slight update. Which is nice, I guess, if you haven't bought a new console in half a decade and don't want to fall totally behind the times. But don't stand there with a straight face and act like this is a leap forward ala NES -> SNES -> N64.

[Mr Bean]

People are jumping the gun here. This is friggin first generation on the Xbox360. We made the 2D to 3D jump already. Seriously we are not going to see so huge a lead in image quality for awhile now. Look as some of the prettier games for the 360... they are a few months down the road still. Gears of War and Obivilion, both still unreleased and much more inline with what the 360 can acutaly do.

[Ace Pace]

People are jumping the gun here. This is friggin first generation on the Xbox360. We made the 2D to 3D jump already. Seriously we are not going to see so huge a lead in image quality for awhile now. Look as some of the prettier games for the 360... they are a few months down the road still. Gears of War and Obivilion, both still unreleased and much more inline with what the 360 can acutaly do.

Also, look at the next Gran Tourismo, if you can't see how advance it is over the current GT games, get your eyes checked.

[Xon]

Anyone who has played Halo2 for non-trivial amounts of time knows that the game pushes the Xbox to the limits. There just isnt enough CPU & GPU grunt to have more than dozen or so AI bots on the screen at any one time.

[Durandal]

So if you spend $400 on an XBox and another five grand on an HDTV, you can finally achieve high-resolution gaming. Add a big hard drive and a keyboard and you might be able to match a PC, except that you can't run anything but games on it.

My thoughts exactly. I could get a quad-core G5 for that money.

[Uraniun235]

Oh, god, now the "wahhh there's no new games it's all old shit rehashed why can't everything be innovative and new and revolutionary" whiners' brigade has decided it's time to complain about consoles. Maybe if we're lucky they'll move onto handhelds in the next few years, and abandon gaming altogether the next few after that so we can enjoy our games in peace.

It's okay. At the time, it was thought that the evil magical powers of the inmates made the toilets swirl the other way, and more of these ivory altars strengthed their arcane powers. Now we just know it's because they're backwards.

Toilets don't swirl the opposite direction just because it's the other side of the planet.

[KrauserKrauser]

I heard that they swirl upwards into some sort of a mystical shit tornado.

Those crazy Aussies and their shit tornados.

[The Dude]

Since when do HDTVs require spending five grand?!? And since when are they used only for gaming?

[Praxis]

When handhelds get a HD-resolution projector built in, I will no longer require my console.