Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 17 May 2006 19:04:31 GMT
It’s official–my Xbox 360 is in UPS’s hands now, due to arrive sometime tomorrow. I’ve wanted one for months, but I wasn’t willing to pay $400 for one, even if they had been easily available. Fortunately (and amazingly), I won a contest at work, and was able to get an Xbox 360 without having to pay for it. Almost as amazing, Xbox 360s are now in stock at Amazon (via Toys-r-Us).
So, most likely the console itself will arrive on Thursday, and Oblivion will arrive on Friday. I’ve been drooling over Oblivion since it was first announced, and certain co-workers haven’t been doing a good job of discouraging me. So, if I go another month without writing anything here, you’ll all know why.
Tags games, xbox, xbox360 | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Fri, 19 Aug 2005 20:13:14 GMT
Gizmodo has a link to a big set of Xbox 360 marketing material. It’s mostly glossy marketing dreck, but there are a couple useful details hiding in there:
- There will be a VGA cable available for the Xbox 360. It’ll cost $40, but that means that the 360 will be playable with existing computer monitors and projectors. This is something that Microsoft screwed up with the original Xbox design–they worked so hard to convince people that it wasn’t a PC that they left out a number of features that would have been useful, like real USB ports and a VGA connector.
- The Xbox 360/Xbox 360 Core System comparison chart in the middle shows “Play Original Xbox Games” as one of the comparison items. The hard drive is required for Xbox compatibility. This has been rumored for months, but this is the first official statement that I’ve seen. Further down is says that “top-selling” games can be played on the 360, including Halo 2.
Tags hardware, xbox, xbox360 | 6 comments
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 17 Aug 2005 14:42:54 GMT
The official Xbox360 prices are out. There will be two models:
- For $299, you can get the basic model with no hard drive, no remote control, and a wired controller.
- For $399, the premium model includes a hard drive ($100), wireless controller ($50), remote control ($30), and HD cable ($30).
Microsoft hasn’t announced a launch date yet, but the rumor is that it’ll be available on Black Friday).
Posted in Computer Hardware | Tags xbox, xbox360 | 1 comment
Posted by Scott Laird
Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:02:00 GMT
We’ve owned an Xbox for several years, and recently bought a Playstation 2, partly to play Katamari Damacy, and partly because there really aren’t many Xbox games that are good for kids under 12 or so.
Both devices have been out for years, so there’s really no point in reviewing them, but I have a couple quick impressions that I’d like to pass on. First, the newest incarnation of the PS2 is tiny. It’s about the size of a mid-sized trade paperback. It’s about as thick as my laptop, but it has under half of the footprint. Volume-wise, I think the console is smaller then two controllers, the power brick, and the video cable. Compared to the PS2, the Xbox is huge–it takes up at least 10 times the volume of the PS2. On the other hand, the Xbox’s DVD drive is front-loading, while the new PS2’s drive is top-loading, which means that you can’t stack anything on top of it. In many ways, the PS2 is actually too small–our 2-year-old stepped on one of the controller wires and sent the PS2 flying out of our entertainment center. The Xbox just won’t do that.
All in all, I think I like the Xbox’s hardware (especially the controllers) better, but the PS2 is a nice addition to the household. I’m looking forward to playing some of the more interesting games that haven’t made it to the Xbox, once I finish with Katamari.
Posted in Toys | Tags games, playstation, ps2, xbox
Posted by Scott Laird
Wed, 27 Apr 2005 19:26:37 GMT
One of the hot questions about the Xbox 360 (or whatever Microsoft ends up calling the new Xbox) is will it be able to play games from the original Xbox. The new system is rumored to be really different from the old system (multiple PowerPC CPUs instead of one Intel CPU, ATI graphics instead of nVidia, no standard hard drive), and Microsoft has been unwilling to commit to any sort of compatibility between the two systems. Everyone believes that MS would like people to be able to play Xbox 1 games on the Xbox 360, but it’s not clear that they’ll be able to get the emulation software to work well enough.
A number of sources have mentioned a recent Xbox Live poll, suggesting that it’s the first clear evidence that the Xbox 360 will include Xbox compatibility. Here’s the text that everyone’s talking about:
Xbox Live is an online gaming service that works across both the current Xbox system and the future Xbox 2. You will be able to play online and compete against others across both consoles. If you are playing an Xbox game on Live you will be able to compete against people playing that same game on Xbox 2.
I read this a bit differently–to me, it says that if you have a game that’s available natively for both the Xbox 1 and Xbox 2/360, then you’ll be able to compete online against users on either platform. This is similar to games that are available for both the PC and the Mac–some games allow mixed-platform network games, some don’t. Since we know that at least two Xbox 1 titles will be available natively on the Xbox 360 (Project Gotham Racing 2 and Halo 2), this is a perfectly reasonable statement for Microsoft to make.
I’m still hoping that they’ll be able to make the compatibility layer work well enough to ship, but I’m not holding my breath. I suspect that it works well enough with most games, but there are a handful that Just Don’t Work, and they’ll probably get less bad press over the lack of backwards compatibility then they would if they released a flaky emulation layer.
One interesting approach that they could take with this–if there are only a small number of broken games, they could pre-load the Xbox 360’s (optional, but required for Xbox 1 compatibility) hard drive with patches (or even complete replacements) for the games that don’t work. Or, they could make the emulator refuse to load the broken games, and then allow emulator updates via Xbox Live. This way, they could push the blame for broken games off to the games’ publishers–“I’m sorry that only Microsoft games work with the Xbox 360, go complain to your game’s vendor.”
Posted in Toys | Tags compatibility, xbox, xbox360 | 19 comments
