<html>

<head>

<title>loonygames - print happy version</title>
</head>

<body leftmargin="10" topmargin="10" bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<table width="100%" border="0" height="58" bordercolordark="#000000" bordercolorlight="#000000">
  <tr> 
    <td height="57" width="26%" align="left" valign="top"> 
      <div align="left"> 
        <h1><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i><a href="../../index.html">loonygames</a><br>
          <font size="1">a <a href="http://www.bluesnews.com">blue's news</a> 
          publication</font></i></b></font></h1>
        </div>
    </td>
    <td height="57" width="74%" align="center" valign="top"> 
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
<p><a href="../2.15/mouth/index.html">&lt;&lt; Back to Normal View</a></p>
<p>URL: <a href="../2.15/mouth/index.html">http://www.loonygames.com/content/2.15/mouth/</a><br>
</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>Vol. 
                2, Issue 15<br>
                March 13, 2000<br>
                </b>
              <b> 
                </b>
              
                <b><i>From 

                  the Mouth of Madness:</i></b></p>
                <b><i> 
                  X-Boxing</i></b></p>
                by 
                  Jason &quot;loonyboi&quot; 
                  Bergman</p>
              
              

<!--
       function gotoSite(obj)
          {
          var s;
          s=obj.options[obj.selectedIndex].value
                         location.href=s;
          }
// -->


              <?
              
              include("/home/loonygames/loony.timedoctor.org/includes/mouth.htm"); 
              
              ?> 
              
              
              
               Well, 
                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.</p>
              The biggest 
                problem is that the system doesn’t exist yet. I don’t care what 
                they’re telling the press and developers; <i>there is no X-Box 
                yet</i>. 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.” </p>
              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.</p>
              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 <i>pre-rendered demos</i>. 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 <i>was</i> 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.</p>
              If you 
                really want to get people excited, show some <i>games</i>, 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 <i>that’s </i>how you impress people. </p>
              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 <i>prevent </i>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. </p>
              And while 
                it will ultimately be the games that sell the system, there’s 
                one thing that is guaranteed – this thing will look <i>awesome</i>. 
                Microsoft has some of the best hardware designers in the business 
                working for them, and that means we’ll get a stylin’ looking system. 
                </p>
              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. </p>
              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). </p>
              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 <i>not </i>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).  </p>
              Needless 
                to say, I can’t wait.</p>
 </p>
              <i>- 
                Jason &quot;loonyboi&quot; Bergman is the editor in chief here 
                at loonygames.<br><p>&nbsp;</p> 
<p><a href="../2.15/mouth/index.html">&lt;&lt;Back to Normal View</a></p>
<table width="100%" border="1" height="29" bordercolordark="#000000" bordercolorlight="#FFFFFF" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
  <tr> 
    <td height="20" width="99%"> 
      <div align="center"><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif"><b><i>loonygames 
        - the best damn gaming magazine online </i></b></font></div>
    </td>
  </tr>
</table>
<p><i><font face="Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="-2">Credits: Print CGI is 
  &copy; 2000 <a href="http://www.square8.com">Square Eight</a>. Used with permission. 
  Article is &copy; 2000 its original author. All other content is &copy; 2000 
  loonyboi productions. Unauthorized reproduction is prohibited. You got that??</font></i></p>
 