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The Xbox 360 Unveiling Thread

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout' started by RC Cola, May 12, 2005.

  1. Faos

    Faos Member

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    [​IMG]


    Microsoft officially unveils Xbox 360

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7835722/

    Console to thrill hard-core gamers, lure newcomers with new features

    The Associated Press
    Updated: 9:30 p.m. ET May 12, 2005


    REDMOND, Wash. - Microsoft Corp. says its next version of Xbox will thrill hard-core gamers with mind-blowing graphics and lure in newcomers with free online games, slide shows, music and video chats with friends.

    Xbox 360 looks nothing like its bulky, black predecessor. It's sleek and white, and it can stand on one end like a book or lie flat like a DVD player. Its 20-gigabyte hard drive and three powerful processors will enable high-definition graphics and surround sound, making games seem more like movies.

    (MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

    Mike Sabine, a market analyst with International Development Group, raved about the lifelike look of a war game he saw in a recent preview offered to analysts and reporters.

    "I actually expected to be a little underwhelmed," he said. "I expected it to be a leap or two better (than the original Xbox), but I was very impressed."

    Another game Microsoft demonstrated featured NBA star LeBron James, his muscles flexing and his shiny tank top rippling in the light of a street lamp as he dribbles and shoots.

    "Honest to goodness it was almost as good as video," said Van Baker, vice president and research director for Gartner Inc.


    Though Microsoft had planned on giving consumers their first peek at Xbox 360 in a half-hour MTV special Thursday night, some of the 200 people who attended the show's taping a week ago leaked pictures and specs on gaming Web sites and blogs last weekend.

    The MTV debut is part of Microsoft's strategy to outshine rival Sony Corp., which is not expected to release the next version of PlayStation until next year. Sony is expected to unveil a working version of PlayStation 3 and announce launch plans at the Electronic Entertainment Expo gaming trade show in Los Angeles next week.

    Microsoft says Xbox 360 will arrive in North American stores around Thanksgiving and in Europe and Japan by year's end. Analysts said several months of lead time could help the new Xbox close in on the market-leading PlayStation, but they're waiting to see what Sony rolls out before making any bold predictions.

    "I think clearly this is going to be a horse race," Baker said.

    Sony now has 43 percent of the U.S. video game console market with PlayStation 2, compared with Xbox at 19 percent and GameCube at 14 percent, according to Jay Horwitz, an analyst with Jupiter Research. He predicts the new Xbox will grab 38 percent of the U.S. market by 2010, overtaking PlayStation 3 by 6 percentage points.


    200 new titles
    Microsoft has said gamers can expect 200 new Xbox titles by the end of the year, but hasn't said how many will be designed for Xbox 360 and whether the new machine will play games designed for the old model.

    There's also no word yet on cost. The current Xbox sells for $149.99.

    Many Xbox 360 features are designed for non-gamers: watching movies, playing music, viewing slide shows or holding video chats. It has three USB ports to connect digital cameras, music players and other devices.

    While current Xbox owners need to buy an attachment to play DVDs, Xbox 360 supports DVD playback out of the box.

    Microsoft is hoping its online gaming service, Xbox Live, will grow in popularity with Xbox 360.

    Xbox Live gamers who can already talk to one another during game play will also be able to see their buddies and competitors in video-chat windows off to one side of the screen. A small video camera for such chats will be sold separately.


    "Gamer guides" will let players introduce themselves to others, making it easier for people to find competitors at their skill level. That could make online gaming seem a lot less intimidating to novices, analysts say.

    "We truly believe the future of gaming is online, ... bringing together massive communities from around the world to play or just to hang out," said Peter Moore, a Microsoft vice president in charge of Xbox marketing.

    For casual gamers, Microsoft plans to include some free online games like checkers or bingo, though the company hasn't said how many will be offered.
     
  2. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    #42 Dave2000, May 12, 2005
    Last edited: May 12, 2005
  3. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    man that show did suck, i do want my 30 mins back.... :(

    you can see every video on that website i posted earlier and then some
     
  4. JunkyardDwg

    JunkyardDwg Member

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    Yeah you know...Madden and what Need for Speed both looked really good it leads me to believe they were cutscenes.

    And as for the other games...i was definitely not too impressed either. There didnt seem to be a whole lot of textures to the environments. The grass in the Tiger Woods clip looked like artificial turf and the buildings in whatever war game they were playing looked way too flat and clean.
     
  5. RC Cola

    RC Cola Member

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    Madden looked like the commercial from a few weeks ago, just slightly different, which makes me think that it was just the pre-rendered crap they showed of them, giving us an idea of how they expect close-ups of McNabb's arm to look on the next-gen consoles. :rolleyes:

    Given that, I'm sure a lot of other clips were pre-rendered as well, although hopefully some of the good ones weren't; that would suck to have real-time games that look like Xbox games and possible next-gen games that have all been pre-rendered. I don't think that was true though. I saw a short clips of Gears of War, which definitely looks next-gen to me, as well as a small Condemned clip, which also looked pretty good. Had they shown more of those games instead of crap like PDZ (still getting over the 5K polygon comment), then I'm sure the show would have been more of a success. Instead, it just seems like it was a big letdown.

    It also sounds like Sony may be willing to give more info out on the PS3 than expected, so Microsoft HAS to have a great E3 to make up for all this, IMO.

    BTW, if you want to check out video clips of some of the games, there are several placed to look. Of course, IGN and Gamespot would probably be good choices. There's also the following sites:
    http://www.xboxyde.com/index_en.html
    http://www.gametrailers.com/

    And there appears to be a torrent that has several, if not all, of the clips. The tracker appears to be down at the moment, but here's where you can find it:
    http://bigfoot1942.sektori.org:6969/index.html?
     
  6. Christopher

    Christopher Member

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    What a dumb w@nk of a show!


    :mad:
     
  7. mogrod

    mogrod Member

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    My guess would be the games were just not ready to be shown a whole lot of for the special. They probably shot this alot of the special weeks ago. I mean, they never reffered to it as 'XBOX 360'. They kept calling it XBOX 2 or whatever (except for screenshots and stuff they could have editted in later).

    The Madden looked like gameplay to me only because, when the reciever caught the ball and then dove into the endzone, he seemed to skip between the two motions. I would think, if it was rendered or animated, it would have been smoother than than. But, I could be wrong.

    The show was crap. Show me more of the features and games and cut out all the musical act. What a waste.

    It was a mixed bag on the game clips as some looked less than impressive for a next-gen console, and then there a few that looked unbelievable. Same with the stuff they showed of Perfect Dark. At times, it looked like something that was on the original XBOX, then other times it looked great.

    I think this show was just meant to create hype and interest, nothing more.
     
  8. wouldabeen23

    wouldabeen23 Member

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    Time to get pumped for HaloIII....I think they were working on it while completing HaloII--thus the delays and set-backs
     
  9. RC Cola

    RC Cola Member

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    I do know that Microsoft hasn't given out final devkits yet and that the hardware that created these games are a little underpowered considering what the final version should be (2 out of 3 cores, plus a current ATI card instead of the new one). I expected there to be some issues with that, which makes sense since Gears of War and Condemned seemed to running at bad framerates. However, both of those games still looked pretty good, while there were other games that looked like Xbox games and ran at bad framerates. FWIW, I think Rare has been working on Perfect Dark Zero for ages, and they were probably the first people to get devkits.

    The show, AFAIK, was taped mostly last week, which explains all the leaks from the weekend. I would think the other stuff could have been added since though.

    The Madden thing looked like the commercial to me, which also seemed to have animations from current-gen, just with pre-rendered models. We all knew that was pre-rendered, but they could have made that commercial look better, so that could explain the animation in the teaser last night. Who knows though.
     
  10. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    after thinking about it over night, with the NBA 2K6 vid, who knows how NFL 2K6 "would" have been :(

    DAMN YOU EA, DAMN YOU...... :mad:
     
  11. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    is it just me or does Ashley Simpson look HOT here:

    [​IMG]

    Btw, an IGN editor wrote a GREAT article about the MTV taping and thought it was pretty humorous. Most people that were there didnt even know that there was a system going to be shown, but were there just for a party.

    http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/611/611184p1.html
     
  12. Faos

    Faos Member

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    I have no problems with her just as long as she doesn't start singing before, during or after I'm having my way with her.
     
  13. Faos

    Faos Member

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  14. v3.0

    v3.0 Member

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    Oh, it won't be her singing...
     
  15. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    Yea, saw the Time Article when i was reading the Dave Chappelle article. Anybody has access to read the whole interivew?

    and yes, id love to have my ways with Ms. Simpson, both of them :)
     
  16. SlvrBtl

    SlvrBtl Member

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    maybe its just me... but i think the new xbox is still a little big... looking at what apple does with its hardware, maybe the new xbox xould be smaller... lilke i said, maybe its just me... :p
     
  17. Coach AI

    Coach AI Member

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    System is awesome, sounds great.

    Games so far underwhelming, the new Perfect Dark looks like crap. (The old one was good). MS is picking the wrong game to focus on out of the gate, though I suppose they have to....make it look like buying Rare a few years ago was actually worth something.

    MTV special was a load of crap, but probably worked perfectly for the audience/purpose they were hoping to achieve. It was a brilliant move on MS's part.

    And funny, because they are targeting the audience that Sony has enjoyed the last two generations...the one that generates a lot of the hype and money that puts a system on top.

    XBOX making a strong, strong push for this next gen.
     
  18. Dave2000

    Dave2000 Member

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    I think its pretty damn interesting system. I probably wont buy it when it first comes out, and will wait till next year's E3 when they bring down the price (hopefully).

    The system doesnt look big at all, pretty much like the original PS2. I like how they made to where it is customizable (like the first XBox wasnt... :p), wireless controllers, XBox Live for EVERY game, and the list goes on.

    The MTV special sucked, but got its point across, got the nongamers attention for the system.

    Perfect Dark does actually look great. THe screens I posted in the first page doesnt do it justice. Waiting to see more during the week :)
     
  19. RC Cola

    RC Cola Member

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    I don't know if you ever got a chance to find the whole article, but if you didn't, here it is (from GA):
    Time also has this pretty cool slideshow with commentary on several of the Xbox 360 games plus the console itself. Check it out:
    http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101050523/gallery/index.html
     
  20. RC Cola

    RC Cola Member

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    Maybe so. Although I believe Kameo is looking pretty good, or least better than Perfect Dark anyways. That game may not have appealed to the MTV crowd as much, although I'm not really sure how some game that runs at 20 FPS and looks like an average PC FPS would appeal to them either. One weird thing about PDZ is that there seems to be a bunch of different versions of Joanna out there; I think there were 4 of them last I counted, including the concept art I posted in the beginning of the thread.

    At least one good thing came out of the whole Perfect Dark Zero showing, and that was the phenomenon known as the Wall Guy. Check out the following links to understand more (pretty funny and includes photoshopping):
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Guy
    http://new.ga-forum.com/showthread.php?t=47083

    Anyways, back to the Xbox 360, I've had some of my faith restored once I started checking out other games, such as Gears of War (although that won't be a launch game, unfortunately for Microsoft). I got to see some clips of the RPG's from Mistwalker (Lost Odyssey and Blue Dragon) as well as the game that Tetsuya Mizuguchi (Rez, Lumines, etc.) is making for the console (Ninety-Nine Nights). The MW RPG's look OK, slightly more impressive that RPG's today, IMO, but they should really help improve the image of the console in Japan. Ninety-Nine Nights, on the other hand, looks very good from what I could tell and could be on the same level as Gears of War, IMO, when it comes to what game seems to give off a next-gen feel. The Testdrive game also looked pretty good depending on how massive the environment is. It seemed to me like it was like Gran Turismo graphics in a GTA type world.

    If anyone wants to check out some of the games I mentioned, you can find some clips here:
    http://www.gamesmediamirror.com/newfiles.html

    I can't remember where I read/saw this, but I want to say that the Xbox 360 is like 10% smaller than the Xbox. Something like the original was like 330 cubic centimeters, while the new one is ~ 300. I may have gotten some numbers wrong though, however someone on G4 (forgot his name, the guy that does the G4TV.com show mostly) said it didn't look too much smaller than the Xbox in person, so take that for what its worth.

    BTW, Sony and Microsoft are supposed to have some press conferences tomorrow, IIRC. Rather than bumping this thread with potential Xbox 360 news, I'll probably create a E3 thread tomorrow, and we can discuss anything that happens this week in that thread. Not sure how that would work though if the big three each have some incredible showings, including next-gen and current gen stuff.
    :confused:
     

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