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"So Billy, what
would you like for christmas?"
Billy thinks for a bit, as he must make one of the toughest decisions of
his young life: Xbox, Playstation 2,
or Gamecube??
"uuumm...xbox!!!"
Billy made one of the best decisions of his life, and I'll tell you why:
Xbox rocks. Playstation 2 is woefully inferior and doesn't measure up to
the components of the Xbox. Sony decided to go the cheap way (for them)
and designed it to use inferior hardware, configure it in one of the most
bizarre manners I have ever seen in my entire life, with utter disregard
for the standards that have arisen to govern computer system design. There
isn’t nearly enough memory in this second generation system. you’d think that
Sony would have learned that “more is better”.
Sony also decided to design
some piece of hardware that they like to call the emotion engine. They claim
that it is a new-age processor that most folks familiar with hardware know is
a complete crock. It has no hard drive and no network connectivity. You need to
buy memory cards for all those games, and everyone knows how pricey they can get.
Also, the integrity of these cards is as about as lasting as a solar eclipse:
sometimes it stays for a bit, but most of the time, it’s gone before you want it
to leave. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had full games saved to a memory card,
and then next time I go to play it the memory on the card is completely wiped out.
Talk about a really bad situation, especially when you played the entire NFL season,
and have moved the Patriots into the superbowl.
You wait to show someone that you made
it and will beat it and the whole season is…..gone. No where to be found. Nothing
you can do about it. Sony says that the upgrades for the console are coming as
far as network capabilities and a harddrive, but didn’t you already pay $300
for your incomplete system? Why should you have to eat those costs? Hands down,
the PS2 is the least technically impressive system on the market today. Xbox and
Nintendo Gamecube beat it easily with one controller behind it’s console. These
are not debatable points – they are 100% verifiable facts. Check it out if you
don’t want to take my word for it.
The hardware configuration for the Xbox is superb. It comes with a 733 Mhz Intel
processor along with a whole crapload of RAM, as well as the latest and greatest
Geforce 3 equivalent Nvidia graphics processor, making the Xbox comparable to most
decent gaming PCs right now. That power is amplified over the power of a PC with
similar hardware because of the integrated system architecture. Many people thought
of the Xbox as a PC thrown into a weird looking box, which turns off many console
gamers. Rather, you should think of the Xbox as a conceit that game developers can
buy into. You don’t understand the nature of the beast if you think the Xbox is only
aimed towards making console gamers happy – this badboy has already begun to sway PC
gamers to the darkside, too. I personally know of many people that have sworn to me
they would never buy a console, that computers can do everything and much much more.
Well, I wish they bet me actual money, because then I could pay off my student loans
and buy a nice car. Microsoft built an ethernet card right into the Xbox: this isn’t
an add-on that you can buy for $100, it’s included in it! This feature will be used
some time next year to welcome the broadband gaming world with open arms. Anyone who
games online already can tell you, there is no other way to go except broadband. What’s
a modem? Wow. I can’t imagine the games we all play online using a modem. The transfer
rate would be nil, and not worth my time or money buying the game or playing it. Right
now, you can already use the network adapter in the Xbox to link Xbox units together
and hosting the most amazing all-night lan wars around. You think you’ll get sleep
at a sleepover when you do that??? Ha!! Buy some jolt cola and get some no-doze, buddy.
In my humble opinion, the sweetest piece of this fine and beautiful machine is definitely
the hard drive. Console games have needed these since they designed the first console.
The hard-drive saves fast than any memory card out there as well. The system does support
memory cards, however, so you can bring your saved games over to a friend’s house. If you
don’t have any friends that have an Xbox, you don’t need one of those. At 10gb (translates
into 50,000+ blocks of memory), this hard drive has more room to save game files for ages
than a nightclub that just cleared out after puff daddy made his grand entrance (he was
innocent though…he didn’t have a gun, honestly…yeah right!). You can even archive them!
In addition to all of these lovely features, you can take any of your music cds, copy
them to your Xbox hard drive, and then tell your games to play your music when you tire
of the game music. Even though some games like feature over 100 songs on their soundtrack,
this is an awesome customizing feature.
Naturally, one of the very few hardware specs of the system that gets slammed is the DVD
playback. You must buy a DVD playback kit, which is a remote control for your Xbox and will
set you back only about $30 if you want to watch movies. Yeah, PS2 does this out of the box
anyways, although the people that I know that use their PS2s to watch DVDs end up buying a
wireless remote so they don’t have to use the PS2 controller, which sets you back at least
$20-30 anyways. The quality of DVD playback for both systems are about the same, but it
should be noted that the Xbox is already using the DVD format for their games, while only
a few titles have done so on the PS2.
The superiority of the Xbox hardware is best conveyed in the superiority of the system menu
and navigation. The PS2 was pretty snazzy when we first saw it, but the Xbox configuration and
menu system is just absolutely amazing. It’s probably easily the coolest interfaces I’ve seen
in on a console, being much more intuitive than the PS2’s menu system. Normally, this wouldn’t
be considered a huge deal, making no impact on which system you would choose, but I think it
stands for the superior hardware and design qualities of the Xbox.
The most popular spec that people email or talk to me about is graphics. “Hey Hyndsy, which
is better as far as graphics, the Xbox or PS2? By now, you should all know that the Xbox is
the best machine. PS2 is working with hardware that is over two years old (don’t forget that
the graphics processor was designed well before the system released), while the Xbox uses a
modified Geforce 3 card, which is the standard for PC gaming today. Anyone that knows anything
about graphics cards and processors knows that they change constantly, on an almost monthly
basis. For the Xboxes to have the latest and greatest now is quite a feat. They timed it very
well. Yeah, awesome things can be done with the PS2, don’t get me wrong. Future generations
of PS2 games and consoles will look better than the previous, but the Xbox has more potential
to reach a higher top end of graphics quality. People now a days learned that you don’t buy
a PC that is awesome now. You buy the best PC out there today, and you make sure that it has
a lot of expandability, so that when things change (in a week) you can keep up with the changes.
The Xbox is just like a PC in that aspect. It is so much more powerful and provides limitless
opportunities for game developers. It’s up to developers to make those games look smooth,
as long as there is hardware out there that can support it. That is the only thing that holds
game developers back, the hardware. Of course you’ll see some Xbox titles that don’t look as
good as PS2 titles, but the potential is already there to smoke PS2 games. You can already
see that much in games like Halo, Munch’s Oddysee, NHL Hitz, DOA3 and Project Gotham. These
games look beautiful. They are simply gorgeous. Even games that don’t look as cool as PS2
games do feature amazing effects like lighting, particle, and shadow effects that are just
so much better than anything we’ve ever seen on any PS2 game. It’s not fair to say that PS2
will never match up to the graphics of the Xbox, but this already sure looks like the Xbox
has the PS2 beat in this arena.
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