Xbox Live - SEGA reps + others talk X-360

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SEGA reps + others talk X-360

Ted

2005-05-10, 8:31 pm

R500 Xenon wrote:

Hey jackass, stop crossposting your crap to the Dreamcast group. The new
Xbox isn't the Dreamcast 2. And when there isn't direct Sega content,
don't crosspost it to the Sega group. It's tiring enough to deal with
your mindless posts on the Xbox group.

R500 Xenon

2005-05-10, 8:31 pm

http://www.tinyurl.com/d78ln

_________________________________________________________

"Will the new Xbox blow rivals away?

Microsoft hopes jump on sales, leaps in technology will add to momentum

By Steven L. Kent
Special to the Tribune
Published May 10, 2005

When Microsoft Corp. launched the Xbox in 2001, it was already late to the
game. For its next-generation console, Xbox 360, Microsoft will get a head
start on its rivals.

But will it be enough?

Dominated for nearly a decade by Sony Corp.'s PlayStation game consoles, the
U.S. video game market brings in more than $10 billion annually in sales.
Sony has sold four times as many game consoles worldwide as Microsoft, but
Xbox has outsold its only other major competitor, Nintendo's GameCube.

Microsoft executives, who declined to be interviewed for this story, believe
they have built a lot of momentum in the gaming industry. Microsoft has sold
more than 20 million consoles and said that more than 1.5 million people
have signed up for its Xbox Live service for online gaming. On top of that,
it had a huge hit with the game "Halo 2," which surpassed $125 million in
sales the day it launched last year.

The Xbox 360 will be available for the holiday shopping season, while new
machines from Sony and Nintendo will not be ready until next year. The Xbox
initially launched about one year after Sony's PlayStation 2, allowing for a
huge advantage in sales.

Microsoft hopes this time will be different.

The company's corporate vice president of worldwide marketing, Peter Moore,
is the former president of Sega of America. He was in charge of the launch
of Dreamcast, the first console of this current generation and also the
first fatality.

He watched as Sony convinced consumers that PlayStation was more powerful
than Dreamcast, undermining Sega's marketing efforts. Moore has vowed that
will not happen to Microsoft.

The technological jump from Xbox to 360 is so great that it is hard to
compare the two units. The new machine will have wireless capabilities, a
large hard drive to allow the machine to double as a home entertainment hub
and significantly more computing power than the Xbox.

And it will be fast, allowing for a more realistic gaming experience.

"If you wonder why men are spending less time watching television and more
time playing games, it's not because of the graphics. It's because of the
experience of being in the game," said David Zucker, president and chief
executive of Chicago-based Midway Games. "The experience resembles what
would happen in the real world if you actually did these things."

Along with breaking new technological ground, Microsoft executives hope to
create new inroads into the mainstream mass market.

To help reach that mass market, Microsoft will officially launch Xbox 360
with a 30-minute special Thursday night on MTV. In the past, game systems
have been unveiled at industry trade shows. Still, Microsoft executives said
additional information about the new system will be detailed at next week's
Electronic Entertainment Expo, or E3, the gaming industry's biggest event.

Also at E3, Sony plans to offer a glimpse of PlayStation 3, the company's
first completely new console system since the 2000 launch of PlayStation 2.

Not much is known about the new consoles coming from Sony and Nintendo. Sony
has announced that its next-generation console will have a cell-based
processor, a technology far more powerful than that used in current game
systems.

Nintendo, like Microsoft, has an IBM chip in its coming game console, called
Revolution.

Electronics analyst Richard Doherty said the Xbox 360 is considerably more
powerful than any existing game console, but he wonders if the bump in power
is big enough. "The graphics we have seen on screen are great, though it's
not as big a transition as we saw between PlayStation and PlayStation 2,"
said Doherty, research director of Envisioneering Group.

But the Xbox team has said the 360 will stand up to the competition and is
confident in the new console's capabilities. In particular, Microsoft hopes
the machine's powerful hardware will advance high-definition technology for
gamers.

Doherty, however, said Microsoft's standards are not sufficiently high when
it comes to HDTV. "They've chosen the lower end of HDTV," he said. "The
higher quality is twice as many pixels, and we have every reason to believe
that the other consoles, PlayStation 3 and Revolution, will be able to
support that."

But 360 has more than enough power, according to Scott Steinberg, Sega's
vice president of entertainment marketing. "The emotional content is an
order of magnitude more powerful on 360 than it is on Xbox or any existing
hardware platform. We can do things with atmosphere, and with tempo, and
with emotional content" that could not be done with existing consoles.
Midway's Zucker agrees that 360 offers a vast improvement in graphics but
argues that 360's power brings other new abilities to the equation. "In
terms of the games themselves, the experience becomes more immersive when
objects, people, dialog and situations happen more and more as they would in
the real world," he said.

Still, many questions about 360 remain unanswered. Microsoft has not
announced pricing, for instance. Nor has Microsoft said whether the new
console will be compatible with existing Xbox games. That will be announced
at E3, Microsoft said.

And although Microsoft has not announced when, exactly, the game will be
available other than sometime this fall, there are more than 100 games
already in production.

It's a start.
__________________________________________________________________

Dog Bowl

2005-05-16, 8:31 pm

In article <qa2dnZRE_O6Jfh3fRVn-gg@comcast.com>, R500Xenon@Xbox360.com
says...

<snip>

quote:

> Not much is known about the new consoles coming from Sony and Nintendo. Sony
> has announced that its next-generation console will have a cell-based
> processor, a technology far more powerful than that used in current game
> systems.

Arrggg. Its not ficking more powerfull just different. The principles of
"cell" have been around for decades. Its just someone has put a business
bullshit buzzword to. "Cell" is the intercomunication technology. Hell
if you did it you could probably do it on a Z80 CPU abet with sod all
resource avaliable to the cell network.