Xbox360...Unimpressive?

[Vamp]

IS it just me, or do others find 360 to be rather unimpressive? It seems to be more of a central media hub for an home entertainment center than a next-generation gaming console. The whole Premium/Core package thing also bugs me...Games are looking rather bland and the system itself seems to be employing a lot of gimmicks and just not looking that extraordinary...

PS3, on the other hand just seems like such exciting, new technology...Most of the PS3 info seems to still be shrouded in secrecy and it looks like a look of next-gen stuff can be expected with it...It seems that 360 is coming out earlier than it should be...

Looks like another Pearl Harbour, folks.

[Peerzy]

Well done, judge a console on what you've heard of from people on the internet and shit CGI made videos that arn't ingame.

As for it being a entertainment center. The Gamecube chose to not do DVD's or music or any of that and just be a games machine and look at how that turned out.

How about you grow a brain cell and wait untill it's released before making a judgement. As far as i know there are no ingame movies, only shyte CGI made ones to promote the games, no one has seen the new OS it will be using and the details about the new Live Service are patchy at best.

Looks like another shit post from Vamp, folks.

[Vamp]

Microsoft is a billion dollar corporation. If their marketing department can't evoke enough of an interest from consumers with a decent campaign so close to the launch, I guess it will take another four years for them to make a profit with this too.

[Mad Cat]

I'd prefer a console that wasn't shrouded in secrecy. The graphics look practically the same from the demoes I've seen, and as Peerzy said most of them most probably are pre-rendered stuff. I don't know if you've tried it, but a modded Xbox with Xbox Media Center is a godsend, watching things from the PC on a TV instead of a PC monitor is superb. You don't need to go faffing about with S-video cables or graphics card outputs either, just plain old network cable.
The Xbox 360 doing that and being able to record to the hard drive from TV out of the box is a great feature. The PS3 can probably do this too, I haven't read much about it, but you were saying it as if it was a bad thing.
Sony has actually stated that it wanted the Playstations to be entertainment centre device rather than simply a games console on many occasions.
The premium/core thing bugs you? Don't buy the one you don't want, its pretty simple. The PS3 isn't going to ship with a properly functional hard drive in any form, stop your bitching.
I haven't heard anything about a PS3 online system that is actually any good yet, either.
Can't provoke interest? Haven't most retailers pre-sold their launch allotments already? I don't think theres much more to say there.
As Peerzy also said, you're talking about speculation. What you're saying is akin to thinking a movie will be good because of a trailer. Everybody knows that isn't true.

I myself don't care which is better or worse, or even which has more innovative hardware. I'll buy whichever is easier to mod and/or has the better games a year or two after initial launch (cheaper, wider software library from the off).

I haven't bothered to read through this and I'm busy, so there'll be mistakes and things I didn't mean to say.
Vamp, you seem to make a load of crap topics that say "X is better than X," they're pretty stupid.

[asmithz]

Sadly theres to many developers complaining about the system lack of a better drive, and not having the hard drive stanard. That makes me sad about it. I want to believe that it will be ok, but it doesn't. Will have to wait and see what happens, mabey they'll work on some new compression methods, or mabey the 360 will have some sord of memory built into it, so that cache data can be written.

[ApacNTS]

or hackers/pirates will gut it out and find how to mod it yourself within the first month of shipping. it'll happen watch, just a matter of time.

[asmithz]

or hackers/pirates will gut it out and find how to mod it yourself within the first month of shipping. it'll happen watch, just a matter of time.

A popular chip group got ahold of several dev kits, the final ones. I bet the hardware will be somewhat the same, and theey can develop the chip needed easy.

[Mad Cat]

Sadly theres to many developers complaining about the system lack of a better drive, and not having the hard drive stanard. That makes me sad about it. I want to believe that it will be ok, but it doesn't. Will have to wait and see what happens, mabey they'll work on some new compression methods, or mabey the 360 will have some sord of memory built into it, so that cache data can be written.

The PS3 isn't going to ship with a hard drive either.
The lack of a better optical drive could be a boon for it at this stage, from what I hear the blu-ray drive that will be in the PS3 will have a much slower read speed than that of current DVD drives (the drives used in the Xbox360), so load times will be incredibly huge, considering it will be something like 20gb of data @ 2x, than 9gb of data @ 16x. The PS3 will likely be un-workable modchip wise for a while because you can't burn blu-ray size games onto DVDs anyway. Rips would be the best bet, but that just makes the whole concept of blu-ray worthless.
I'm talking from the perspective of copying games, instead of retail.
Something interesting is that PC games that have the same high definition graphics that the Xbox360 and PS3 will use have been around for ages now, and a hell of a lot of them still only appear on CDs. PC games are mainly run from hard drives, I know, but a couple of DVDs is a lot bigger than the size of most game installations. With proper compression the drive size shouldn't matter.
Yet another point, while everyone is asking for high definition games, I really doubt most people own HDTVs. A lot of the people I know run their games consoles off of secondary TVs to the ones they use for watching broadcasted TV, and are shitty portables.

[silent h3ro]

Remember: ITS NOT OUT YET!!

[asmithz]

The PS3 isn't going to ship with a hard drive either.
The lack of a better optical drive could be a boon for it at this stage, from what I hear the blu-ray drive that will be in the PS3 will have a much slower read speed than that of current DVD drives (the drives used in the Xbox360), so load times will be incredibly huge, considering it will be something like 20gb of data @ 2x, than 9gb of data @ 16x. The PS3 will likely be un-workable modchip wise for a while because you can't burn blu-ray size games onto DVDs anyway. Rips would be the best bet, but that just makes the whole concept of blu-ray worthless.
I'm talking from the perspective of copying games, instead of retail.
Something interesting is that PC games that have the same high definition graphics that the Xbox360 and PS3 will use have been around for ages now, and a hell of a lot of them still only appear on CDs. PC games are mainly run from hard drives, I know, but a couple of DVDs is a lot bigger than the size of most game installations. With proper compression the drive size shouldn't matter.
Yet another point, while everyone is asking for high definition games, I really doubt most people own HDTVs. A lot of the people I know run their games consoles off of secondary TVs to the ones they use for watching broadcasted TV, and are shitty portables.

yea i agree.

The bad thing tho, is that microsoft is forcing everygame to be in standard and hi-def.

Some intresting read

From aussiexbox.com.au (in an article about Saint's Row, a game currently in development by Volition and published by THQ):

Last but not least, after we were told that there was no ability to fly aircrafts in the game due to the DVD drive's inability to stream the environment fast enough in full 720p resolution. We asked Jacques Hennequet (Producer for Saint's Row), "If the Xbox 360 Hard Drive was standard across both SKU's, would flying aircrafts in the game have been a reality?", Jacques simply answered "Yes". While he completely understands why MS made the decision to not include a hard drive in the Core System, I think he felt somewhat disappointed, as it could have opened up much more possibilities within the gameplay for Volition's first Xbox 360 title.

From computerandvideogames.com (in an interview with David Braben currently developing The Outsider for the Xbox360):

* CVG: Looking across all three consoles - 360, PS3 and Revolution - what possibilities does the next gen offer to you as developer?
* David Braben: They offer both huge technical opportunities to shine by making the best use of the machine, but also big risks. The quality expected for games on these consoles is very high, and this requires a great deal of work to produce the games.
The 360 is pretty well here now, and I think we all have a good idea of what to expect; the PS3 and Revolution are perhaps darker horses. Perhaps one of the most significant elements of the PS3 is the Blu-Ray disc technology. I am a little nervous that with streamed data (ie where data is loaded constantly from disc), the Xbox 360 will still be quite restricted because of the DVD format disc. Revolution is (I think) different again, and is perhaps less powerful, but to be honest it is the platform we know the least about.

About the speed of Blu-Ray... This seems to say its much much faster.

Storage capacity and speeds One single-layer Blu-ray Disc (BD) can hold about 25 GB or over two hours of HD video plus audio, and the dual-layer disc can hold approximately 50 GB. The data transfer rate is 36 Mbit/s (54 Mbit/s for BD-ROM), but 2x speed prototypes with a 72 Mbit/s transfer rate are now in development. The BD-RE (rewritable) standard is now available, to be followed by the BD-R (recordable) and BD-ROM formats in mid-2004, as part of version 2.0 of the Blu-ray specifications. BD-ROM pre-recorded media are to be available by late 2005. Blu-ray Discs with capacities of 100 GB and 200 GB are currently being researched, with these capacities achieved by using four and eight layers respectively. On May 19, 2005, TDK announced a prototype four-layer 100 GB Blu-ray disc.

And what gam3guy said, Its not out yet, so we wont know.