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The new enhancements to Xbox Live sound worthwhile, although I’m not so sure that I like the idea of premium downloads. When I buy a game, I like something physical to hold in my hand, rather than just purchasing data.
Some people believe that Microsoft is making a fatal mistake by releasing the Xbox’s successor so soon, mainly because Sony is destined to blow everyone away with even more powerful hardware next year.
I have a huge backlog of games from this generation to worry about playing without worrying about what the next generation has to offer, anyway.
What’s wrong with premium downloads? Xbox 1 has it now.
It’s just that when I pay for something, I like to be able to have something physical to show for it. Can you take the game with the extra content and play it on your friend’s Xbox? If you can, then how does Microsoft stop piracy? If you can’t, then the data is restricted to your actual machine and isn’t something that you can sell later on if you wanted to, like you can with physical games.
Heh… Point taken, but such is the way of things. There are tons of games that don’t allow you to do that nowadays. MMORPGs, for one.
And trust me… game companies don’t want you re-selling games. That’s one lost sale for them, and the money that does come in goes strictly to the retail.
unless something especially impressive pops up, i probably won’t get a next gen console for a few years… at least until a price drop.
Like the fabled “emotion engine” which was absolutely nowhere near as awesome as it sounded?
I won’t make any judgements on the next generation until I see some games. I abandoned the current crop of consoles due to a rather unique and long list of curious events reagarding the consoles I owned.
In either case here is a small side note that Microsoft Game Studios will use Unreal 3 technology in their next-gen Xbox titles.
[quote=“Arcie”]
Like the fabled “emotion engine” which was absolutely nowhere near as awesome as it sounded?[/quote]
As Abadd once said, it’s never a good idea to under-estimate stupid people in large numbers. 
Many gamers will almost certainly wait for the PS3 in the hopes of buying a more powerful console. Microsoft must be hoping that both consoles will be so powerful that a little more horsepower under the PS3’s hood won’t make the slightest bit of difference.
I wonder how MS can keep their console cost efficient with that kind of specs… Three 3Ghz processors? Insane… I’ll certainly be tempted to buy a console with that kind of power if the price is right (though I’m disapointed seeing it will have 256MB Ram, I figured 512MB would be what they’d install in it seeing as even current PC games -see Doom 3- require 1GB in order to allow the maximum texture quality…
You also have to remember that a console is a dedicated gaming machine… A PC has to run a lot of background programs (ehem… XP?) that tend to take up a lot of memory. It’s an issue of balancing performance vs. cost.
And considering that the PS2 had 4MB of memory and Xbox had 64? I’d say it’s a vast improvement 
Well, I wouldn’t take a whole lot of this as being set in stone. Things will change.
I remember when they said the Dreamcast would have 16 mb of RAM everyone was shocked.
Yeah, that’s something I never really liked about some software licenses. You can buy a car or a TV and resell it, so technically if data is just another thing that you’re paying for it would make sense to be allowed to resell it. I’m not even sure if I can sell my copy of Half-Life 2 (not that I want to). I guess from a business point of view though, why would they let you? 
By the way, does three 3.0 GHz PowerPC cores mean that Xbox 2 will run at the equivalent of a 9 GHz PC…? It that were the case it seems rather high considering we’re only just reaching 4GHz now…
Well, I know, that’s why I said I was expecting 512MB Ram and not a full GB which is pretty much the current minimum must have for PCs.
Another thing I’m curious about is their choice to use standard CPUs rather than 64bit or dual core or whatever the new techs are since consoles usually take advantage of the latest tech of their time. I guess they’d be more expensive (though it could have less than three CPUs that way) but wouldn’t it also make PC to X-Box conversions that much easier since 64bit is soon going to be the standard for PCs?
I doubt it. That feels an awful lot like a free lunch to me.
I wonder what kind of texture compression methods the Xenon will utilize. The Dreamcast used VQ compression, which although was incapable of compressing transparancies down to size, still compressed everything down to a 5:1/8:1 ratio. I think the GameCube and Xbox used STI compression methodology, which could compress anything (even transparancies) at a 6:1 ratio.
Of course, the poorly designed PS2 can’t compress and decompress anything in real-time at all. It had to rely on streaming textures in several times a frame to compensate. Cry me a river, Sony.
I’m hoping that if there is a new PD game it will come out on the XBox.I wouldn’t want to leave the XBox franchises behind but I’m afraid I will if I have to (if PD5 comes in a different console).
I wish Microsoft would simply pay Sega to develop a new Panzer RPG exclusively for the Xenon.
Some people seem to believe that the Xbox killed the series, though I personally don’t believe Panzer Dragoon Orta would have sold any better on the PS2.
It would depend what kind of better we’re talking about; comparatively speaking, I’d say that a lower percentage of PS2 owners would have bought PDO than the percentage of Xbox owners that bought it, simply because more casual gamers seem to own PS2s than Xboxes (and PDO was essentially a hardcore gamer’s game). However, I’d suspect that could still add up to more sales for the game than it received on the Xbox, owing to the truly huge user base of the PS2.