XBox 360: Who's getting one? - Page 4

I am waiting and periodically calling the local stores to see when / if they will get a new shipment in.

either you are out of your mind or 1000 dollars to you is like 100.


there will be enough 360s out by christmas. if you want one i'm sure you can get one by then.


no need to fork over that kind of cash.

FIRST POST WOOHOO!

Anyways, being a big fan of Halo, I've got to say I don't see the reason to let go of my box for a 360 until Halo 3 comes out (which, at this point, is never).
Also, the new console seems to have mad bug. Overheating, graphical issues with backwards compatibility (see www.highimpacthalo.org, it's like 2nd or 3rd post; One of the sites I favor for Halo tricking).
Yea. My opinion, wait for a revision and/or price drop.

While I have a general anti-MS bias, I don't feel these initial quality control problems are a major issue. Some are to be expected. If these problems get worse and keep appearing in later production then there may be serious problems.

I'm stoked about Revolution though, and I don't recall reports of Game Cubes choking.

yeh because it was a weak machine.=)

What the hell is happening on eBay? They are going for INSANE prices. And at the same time I can go down and buy one for less than $500 at the local shop.

DId MS make a royally screw up sending enough our way while leaving the home marked dried out?

boy, I wish I was from a fucking dreamworld so I could go down and pick one up. Nobody around here will even give me a clue about when they may be getting a shipment in.

btw where is fucking dreamworld

Got a chance to take the 360 for a spin at a retailer. The game? PDZ. WTF?? The graphics completely suck. I hope that's the publishers fault, because if that is supposed to be representative of the platform, it's going to be easy pickins for the PS3.

On the contrary, its more apt to say the GameCube has a weak selection of games and a non-standard controller.

But it plays Zelda, which I'll keep buying until I die.

I doubt it is. I'd say a fair number of those games are done on some pretty tight schedules. I'm certain they'll improve.

Well, you see - there lies the problem. They rush the games, they rush the release - what was the point? They have practically blown their first to market advantage.

Just had an interesting conversation with a GameStop employee:

me: "Do you have any xbox 360s"
them: "Nope, pre-order waiting list is 2 months"
me: "How is the quality on the unit"
them: "Not very good, I wouldn't order the first rev of any console - quite a few of our orders returned to Microsoft due to overheating and backwards compatibility problems"

The funny thing was that the person tried to convince me to pre-order a PS3 in Janruary right after advising me not to buy 1st rev hardware.

Funny news today by Balmer about xbox 360 shortage. Yields are the problem. But of which chip, is ATI or IBM dropping the ball. I suspect IBM.

I remember reading about a company that was already saying one of their Xbox360 games was going to be 3-4 discs because there was no HD-DVD support. I can't remember exactly where I heard it. It might have been on the Gaming Steve podcast. But you have to remember that a lot of the Japanese developers LOVE to use prerendered FMV (Full Motion Video) clips inter-mixed with cutscenes that are rendered by the in-game engine. If they want these videos to look good on the highest end setup for the Xbox360, it's going to have to be 1080i video. That takes up a lot of space. If anything, this could alienate MS from some of the Japanese developers (at least some of the RPG ones). Yea, they could just make you change discs, but with Blu-Ray on the PS3 you don't have to. They may decide to go PS3 only to give their audience a better experience (no game interruptions to change discs).

Everything that is run by suits is rushed to market. Windows is rushed to market, OS X.4 Tiger was rushed to market, video games (console or PC) are rushed to market. This isn't something that is necessarily just a console and/or Microsoft problem. Too many people want things right now, and they don't want to put in the time to make a quality product, so they try to release something that is 'good enough.'

According to Gaming Steve, MS rushed production on Perfect Dark Zero (They skipped over the 'qa testing' that they do on all XBox360 games before they allow them to ship) just to get it out as a launch title. I don't have an Xbox360 and PDZ so I can't comment on the quality, but I'm just trying to illustrate the point. Very few companies take the time and effort that companies like Blizzard take with their games. (Beta period for World of Warcraft lasted 1 year; They didn't like the direction that Ghost was going so they completely scrapped the project and started over from scratch rather than try to take the game and add on to it to push it out the door)

I agree. Some of the people in here tend to have the "My Xbox works fine, so everyone saying they have a problem is a whiney sissy" syndrome. I see this all over the place. People assume that if they don't have a problem with someone that it's perfect and anyone that says it has problems is stupid. I have never had a problem with my PS2 or PSTwo, but that doesn't mean that all of the people that had lasers burn out, or PSTwo over-heating issues are 'over blowing things.'

Some of the people tend to forget that MS doesn't necessarily have a single supplier for all of their components. Sure for things like IBM and ATI chips they do. But less specific things like the power supplies may have parts from several vendors. Any of those vendors could have had bad production runs or shipments to Microsoft that come from a specific factory that had a bad run of capacitors, etc. Not only that it could just be a bad run of Xboxes from one of Microsoft's plants. Unless you have surveyed all XBox360's in existence, or at least a sampling of Xboxes from various geographical locations to ensure that you are getting a sampling from multiple shipments / factories / production runs, you can't claim to know if your perfectly working Xbox360 (and your friends for that matter) is an isolated case, or if the problems are isolated cases.

About the GameCube, I think there were some early problems. But I don't think that they were major. In either case, Nintendo has a better handle on creating consoles than Microsoft or Sony. They've probably worked out ways of getting them into production quickly without major issues over the years they have been in the industry. Possibly they work with the manufacturing people as the console is being designed to ensure that the manufacturing people have a handle on what will be expected ahead of time. Rather than just dumping it on them once the console is ready for production.

Well you wouldn't be getting a 1st rev hardware. Sony is releasing it in Japan first in the spring.

Digital vs Analog won't be that much different. It has to do with the underlying technology. Digital just makes it so that the signal through the wire is less affected by interference. You can have full HD video through analog, but the content companies can't add a 'broadcast flag' or other DRM to that. I seriously don't think that digital vs analog will be the defining argument in the XBox360 vs PS3 debate.

You have a point, there were more bugs plaguing the Japanese release of the Playstation 2 than the North American release.

If the XBox360 were truely as fucked as you want us to believe, then there wouldn't be people that have XBox360's that are working without problems. Some of these problems might not even be design related, but just production problems or a shipment of bad parts. Remember that run of bad capacitors in some motherboards a couple of years ago? Did you blame the motherboard companies for 'trying to shit those puppies out?'

I'll admit that Microsoft probably rushed this out the door, but from your statements I'd expect to go to a store and see mountains of XBox360's behind the return desk. Somehow I don't thing this is the case. As far as number, Microsoft probably doesn't have the kind of numbers you are talking about. They probably don't feel that they need to release 'numbers to prove' something to a handful of bloggers and people bitching on forums.

We just have to wait and see what the full effects of this will be. Anything at this point is just idle speculation. And if you remember correctly, the Japanese release of the Playstation 2 was plagued with problems, but I don't think that the Playstation 2 turned out a failure...



You also have to allow time for the developers to get used to the new APIs and the new technology. You're never going to see a release title the is able to leverage the full power of a gaming console. Give it 1-1.5 years before games start to utilize all of the power that the XBox360. The same goes for the PS3. I don't know about the Revolution though. Nintendo's first-party titles may be able to leverage a good portion of it's power since a lot of that is done in-house, but I suspect it will suffer the same problem (of needing time).

You also have to remember that these companies are over-promising what they will deliver, with the possible exception of Nintendo. Sony and Microsoft are both hyping up their consoles. I was disappointed at the last round of consoles after all of the hype about how ultra-realistic they would be. This doesn't mean that the consoles were failtures. It just means that people are going to end up realizing what the hype was and what the reality is after they finally get their hands on the consoles.


Playstation 2 was a money-loser for Sony when they first released it. It was only after they were able to refine their production processes that they turned that around. The fact that they are a software company has nothing to do with it. Microsoft designs excellent mice, there is no reason they can't do well in the console race. They may make mistakes and need to learn from them, but I don't see the 'they are software, and will always only be sofware' mentality that you possess. i agree that the XBox design was horrid, but there is nothing wrong with the XBox360 design. I'll admit that it's a question of personal taste, but it's not like the Playstation 2 is winning any beauty pagents either (I really like the PSTwo's design though mostly due to its size).

The real irony here is that with the floating point ridiculousness the PS3 claims to offer, the engine renders are problably as good as any cutscene short of the highest-budget production.

I somehow doubt that it will be delivered to us as it is marketed/promised. As I recall, this type of stuff was promised to us last console generation, though not at 1080p.

These units have a pathetic >90< day warrantee. I would say that the ones which received DOA models are the lucky ones.

I'm not asking for launch titles to take full advantage of the console. I'm asking that games launched with a "Next Generation" to look better than games currently available on the GameCube. That is not the case with the majority of titles launched with the 360.

Again, what is the point of the advantage of first to market, if you are just going to deliver a sub-par playing experience?

Well, there are the specialized things. Complex models like moving water, explosions and collapsing buildings can still look somewhat better in a video. The physics could be pre-calculated, and the zillion polygons left for the game engine to render, but most game engines are specialized for certain assumptions and just aren't going to be very good at this job. It's easier and cleaner just to render the video, keeping the "normal" elements of the picture consistent with the game's looks to preserve immersion (don't shift from a cartoon cell-animated game to a real video in cutscene ) and using the added power mostly for the special effects.

It's true that this material will in all likelyhood fill only a minuscule part of a next-generation optical disk even on the games that use out-of-engine cutscenes, and dual layer DVD would suffice for the games.

Not much consumer electronics comes with more than a 90 day warranty anymore, unfortunately. Hopefully the Playstation 3 and the Nintendo Revolution end up with 1 year warranties. Though if you bought your XBox360 from Best Buy, Circuit City, or whatever other consumer electronic stores are selling them, I'm sure they would be more than willing to sell you their store insurance policy. Sure it's extra money, but if you are worried that your system may fail after the manufacturer's warranty, then it could be worth the investment.

It's a vicious circle. Take Tiger for example. I was pretty surprised how flaky the 10.4.0 release was. But on the other hand, people where putting of buying Apple hardware, because they wanted Tiger pre-installed. What options does Apple have?

They are hoping to lure in the early adopters, basically. With the price of the console and the lack of a good supply right now, the XBox360 isn't going to be bought by a lot of parents. My parents never would have bought a game console that was that expensive (just for the console, not even for the games) for me for Christmas (I grew up in the NES/SNES era and had to buy my own N64 in highschool because my parents wouldn't buy me a new console as a gift). It will mostly be early adopters/older gamers that will be buying this. Microsoft wants to get sizable user-base before the Playstation 3 comes out. That's it, plain and simple. If the console is too buggy and the games are lackluster, this strategy might be doomed to failure (doesn't mean that the console will fail as long as they fix things before the Playstation 3 release, though their image might be stained by it).

If the game designer isn't going to use the in-game engine to render the cutscenes, then the 1080i video that they will need could fill up more then a DVD9 can hold. Granted, this probably won't be a large amount of games. It's not like Sly Cooper or Jak & Daxter are cutting edge graphically. The first Sly Cooper game was around 1GB maybe. But these aren't the type of games being talked about. It'll mostly be Japanese RPGs that make heavy use of cutscenes. And those Japanese RPGs can have hours of cutscenes. There is also the story-driven 3D action game that emerged in the last console round. Games like Metal Gear Solid (though, the first was on PSX), and Devil May Cry. I only played the first Devil May Cry game, but the cutscenes there weren't in-game. (Though, IIRC, Metal Gear Solid games use in-game rendered cutscenes)

We can debate this point back and forth, I'm afraid. It's really up to the game developers and how they make their decisions in the end.

Then how do you explain the *huge* difference in analog and digital video quality wrt computers and computer monitors?

Cable interference is not the issue. The issue is D/A conversion in the source unit, and then A/D conversion inside the LCD monitor. If you have any kind of TV other than CRT, digital video will make a huge quality difference.

I never noticed a huge difference in quality on my Dell 2005FPW when switching between SUB-D and DVI-D to my PC. I've never done a side-by-side comparison, but when I've used one or the other I've never said, "Whoa! I know Kung Fu!"

i dont know what you are talking about. do you own an xbox 360?

have you played the new madden? have you played Condemned?

those games look really damn good to me.

gamecube? are you serious? have you played project gotham ? lol


my god man.

i know launch titles are usually not the greatest but geesh what do you want? a pixar film?

What is sub-d? Is it the same as vga?

Anyway, with a mac mini and a Dell 24" LCD monitor, the difference is very large.

Jesus, has anybody in this discussion actually reached puberty yet?

I have. Of course, my only contribution to the thread was to ask a couple of questions and say I'm too cheap to get a 360 so you probably weren't talking to me.

The topic of the post was 'XBox 360: Who's getting one?' but (as usual) it's all slid downhill into 'You idiot my daddy's tougher than your daddy'.

Yea. When you are switching video inputs, SUB-D is displayed on the screen when you switch to the VGA adapter (DVI-D when you switch to DVI, etc). I'm sure that it's probably closer to the technical term for it, because I have heard VGA referred to as subd on at least one other occasion. I would assume it's the same on your 24" Dell as well.

I'd like to think that my posts, at least, haven't come off that way. I'm in no way a fan-boy of any of the consoles, though I'll probably at least end up with a Revolution for the Nintendo 1st party titles. It's unfortunate that people tend to think that a discussion on game consoles means it's time to play "King of the Hill" and try to out-do the 'next guy' to prove that their console of choice is the best.

I agree that this has gone off-topic, but I don't think that a conversation on consoles is a bad thing, as long as people can behave themselves. There has been some very rational discourse here about the consoles that has been off-topic, but it's the people that insist that this thread is somehow a descendent of The Highlander and "There can be only one" that ruin it.

... says someone with a 17-line sig about his "hardware".