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##### Vol. 2, Issue 15
March 13, 2000

#####

From the Mouth of Madness:

X-Boxing

by Jason "loonyboi" Bergman

ell, over the weekend, Microsoft made their long-overdue announcement about their plans to break into the already crowded console market with their X-Box system. Now, speaking as a console fan, I’m excited. I collect these things, so naturally any new system is sure to make me happy. But at the same time, there’s something a little fishy about what Microsoft has been telling people about their X-Box console.

The biggest problem is that the system doesn’t exist yet. I don’t care what they’re telling the press and developers; there is no X-Box yet. Just projected hardware specs and software tests. It doesn’t exist, and there certainly aren’t any developer’s kits yet. How do I know this? Simple – as soon as last Monday, the official specs for the system hadn’t been nailed down. Up until the day before Bill Gates went on CNBC and told the world it existed, nobody was sure if AMD or Intel was going to end up as the core processor, and even the initial announcement only said, “an x86 compatible processor.”

This doesn’t mean Microsoft can’t go around telling people to commit to the system, mind you. Because it’s going to run on an OS that’s based on the Windows 2000 kernel (a great decision on their part) they can give developers a list of things they need to build into their PC titles to easily port them over. But Microsoft is going to milk their initial publicity for all it’s worth, and make it seem to the general public like the system is on the verge of release – when in fact it’s more than a year and a half away.

Which brings me to another problem. Microsoft is claiming that the X-Box will be more than twice as powerful as the Playstation 2. That’s great news, and I can’t wait to see what it can do…but because they didn’t have any physical hardware to show off at their announcement, they showed pre-rendered demos. Boo, hiss, Microsoft. For shame! The demonstrations they showed were pre-rendered movies, that were intended to simulate what the X-Box will be capable of. Unfortunately, it was neither particularly technically impressive (several developers have said that there was nothing shown that a decent team couldn’t easily reproduce on the Playstation 2) nor was it visually impressive to the general public. Now granted, this wasn’t supposed to be a major announcement to the general public (it was at the Game Developer’s Conference), but nonetheless, the news made its way to many major news outlets, and so the demo was widely shown.

If you really want to get people excited, show some games, man. At the initial Playstation 2 announcement, the world snoozed their way through a particle lightshow, before getting their heads blown apart by a cut-scene from Final Fantasy VIII rendered in real-time (not to mention that awesome clip from Tekken Tag Tournament). Now that’s how you impress people.

But I’m being a little harsh here, and I realize that. In truth, the X-Box is a good thing. A very, very good thing. As bizarre as it sounds, Microsoft is going to prevent a major monopoly from occurring. Sony plans on dominating your living room with their Playstation 2, and that’s all fine and good, but do you really want all your eggs in one basket? Competition, particularly from someone with as much cash behind them as Microsoft, can only benefit the end-user. Microsoft is planning on spending more to promote the X-Box than they did to promote Windows 95. According to Gates himself, the company will spend, “billions over the next five years” getting this thing out there.

And while it will ultimately be the games that sell the system, there’s one thing that is guaranteed – this thing will look awesome. Microsoft has some of the best hardware designers in the business working for them, and that means we’ll get a stylin’ looking system.

I’m a little troubled by certain things, however. The system has a hard drive out of the box (an 8 gig drive, to be exact). This has all kinds of implications…some of which are very positive, like the fact that memory cards will never be needed for the system, but there are also some bad things. For example – what about viruses? If it’s intended to be used for online gaming, it’s going to be wide-open for virus attacks. And if it’s got a hard-drive, that means someone could figure out how to get into your X-Box and completely wipe your system. And what about fragmentation? An 8 gig hard drive needs to run CHKDSK and Defrag on a regular basis or it’s going to go sour. A console system with a buggy hard drive is a bad thing.

Microsoft says the drive will be used primarily for caching of games in progress (cool) and also for downloading additional content for games. I don’t expect people to issue bug-fixes for X-Box games, so I wouldn’t worry about people releasing half-completed games with the intention of fixing them later…but wouldn’t it be nice to know that if a game slips through the cracks it can be fixed? I bet Sony wishes they could have done that with Gran Turismo 2…and Acclaim with Turok: Rage Wars (although there really isn’t much of anything that could save that one).

Ultimately, this announcement from Microsoft raised as many questions as it answered. This year’s E3 will be really exciting, as it’ll have Sony formally announcing the details of the Playstation 2 US launch (rumors are flying that it’ll be released as soon as August), more Dolphin details from Nintendo (including the next GameBoy system, which will apparently not be the GB Advance yet), Sega’s Dreamcast Network 2000 details, and hey! Even SNK is going to be announcing a new system in addition to the next big X-Box announcement (expect games this time, people).

Needless to say, I can’t wait.

- Jason "loonyboi" Bergman is the editor in chief here at loonygames.

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Credits: Illustration © 2000 Dan Zalkus. From the Mouth of Madness is © 2000 Jason Bergman. All other content is © 1999 loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited, you cartoonish villian, you.