If I see anymore "the Gamecube is childish" or "the XBox is an upraded PC" Im gonna puke all over this place.

SSM:M may have cartoonish graphics but I really dont think its exactly marketed towards children. How many kids know who Samus was? A big hunk of this game is a nostalgia trip for us 25-35 year old gamers who remember the NES and SNES with fondness.

And how is the Box anymore a PC-clone than any of the other consoles? Because its made by Microsoft? All of the consoles are PC parts optimized for gaming. Period. The DC had a MS OS in it. The GC uses Apple pieces. The PS2 uses dual chips. How is the Box that different? Really?

Im a hardware agnostic. Or maybe more to the point Im a game whore. I could care less about the label on the machine.

The hardware debates will always go on, but you are right the software is really all that matters. The great games are what we remember and talk about and not the console we played it on. Unfortunately, not everyone can own every piece of hardware out there, but as long as you get a system with plenty of games you like you shouldn't worry about anything else.

All three consoles look like solid choices and all three look to be well supported. It's not going to be a situation like in the past when Jaguar, 3DO, etc owners felt abandoned after buying the system. Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft are serious about supporting their hardware, so everyone should be happy.

The problem I'm having now is finding time to play all the great games available.

I'm not trying to aggravate you or anything, but the reason why those statements are stereotypes is because there's an element of truth to them.

The GC has technicolor buttons on the controller with a preponderance of cute, cartoonish characters in many of its launch games. Why would it be surprising for a casual observer to come to the conclusion that it's geared towards a younger market? You and I know that many of those "cute" games offer loads of fun for adults, but that's because we've been able to look past the surface.

The XBox is a PC with a unified memory architecture and proprietary firmware. It runs an x86 processor, an nVidia GPU and utilizes off the shelf PC components in every part of the system. MS even trumpets this fact to persuade PC game developers that developing for the XBox requires almost no learning curve. The XBox hardware is essentially a specialized, dedicated gaming PC.

How is this a bad thing? Is it inherently better to reinvent the wheel? If it pushes better graphics why is a built from scratch "emotion engine" automatically better?

The X-Box uses DX8, which will make games better and better in the future when they learn how to harness its power better.

Yeah, well I hear the Gamecube likes to get fresh with other small consoles, bumping controller ports...

Oh, you mean TECHNICAL stereotypes...I see.

If your gonna hurl, hurl into this. (hands jolt a paper cup)

It's not nessessarily a bad thing, as the X-Box shows. However, it does have three inherent flaws.

1. Games written for X-Box will not be difficult to port to PC. This means few exclusive titles, as many things will be ported to PC just because it doesn't require much tweaking. I also wouldn't be surprised to see an X-Box emulator and an X-Box controller connector for PC in the near future. ...of course, this works both ways, and games for the PC will likely hit XBox long before they hit competing consoles.

2. Stability. We've all come to expect flaky stability out of PCs and MS software. Is there anything reassuring that this won't be any different? Perhaps because everything is standardized across the line, we won't have too many problems -- but seeing as how there's never been a hang-free console, I won't hold my breath.

3. Shelf life. What happens when PCs outstrip the XBox hardware by a large margin? Suddenly porting games over to the XBox doesn't work so well, and any games ported back to the PC will look tons better -- and most gamers own a PC as well as a console. The reason consoles like PS1 and SNES held on long after their shelf life was because of the exclusive titles that just couldn't be played on any other system. In these cases, it was prohibitivly expensive to port things over to PC, so they never got ported. With the XBox, that barrier disappears. I don't know how big this one is, it could be huge or it could be insignificant if MS can lock up enough titles.

Having an x86 processor, etc. is not necessarily a bad thing. But it is where the "PC-clone" comes from. It's a game system made from PC parts by a traditionally PC software/hardware company.

99.99% of all problems with Windows stems from the DLL. This is a problem with the OS trying to be all things for all users. There is no dynamic linking or upgrading of shared files going on in a closed environment like the Box's. This is what drives me crazy about the comparision. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

So is the PS2, Gamecube, and Dreamcast. Thats my point. The Cube uses an unmodified PowerPC 750CXe microprocessor.

I think Microsoft is doing the Xbox right and believe me I was as unsure about it as anyone. However, they are treating it as a game system and not a PC. They do not want the hard drive used for game patches (except maybe add-ons for new players etc). They want all games 100% ready to go on release. They do not want the ethernet used as a web browser, but for online gaming only. They are trying to keep it as far away from a PC as possible.

What parts its made out of is pointless. The PS2 has two USB ports, a fireware port, and soon a harddrive and modem. Its could be considered a PC clone as much as any system.

OK. But let's look at this picture:



Is that the inside of my Compaq Deskpro? No, it's an Xbox. Even has a Western Digital hard drive and what looks to be a typical DVD-ROM. That's why it's getting the PC clone stereotype. It's not just using a microprocessor that happens to be used in PCs, it uses the same drives and drive interfaces. Processor alone does not make a PC clone. Is it a PC Clone? I don't believe it can run MS-DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 2000, etc. out of the box, so no it's not. But does it make sense that when a PC software/hardware company takes typical PC hardware and builds a game system out of it, people could get the idea that it's like PC clone? Sure.

Jolt, I think you're equivocating PC and pc. PC means IBM PC compatible. pc means personal computer in general. If you're saying that all consoles use pc parts, then well duh, they're computers, they're going to use computer parts. If you're saying that all consoles use PC parts, then you're wrong.

The EE in PS2 is a highly integrated device with a MIPS RISC core and 2 vector units among other things. Its GS chip relies on 16 parallel pixel pipelines and extremely high bandwidth access to embedded DRAM for its power. It's a wildly different architecture than what programmers are used to which is why it took a year before games began to tap its full potential.

The CPU in the GC is a derivative of the PowerPC 750CXe. I don't believe its exact modifications have ever been made public, but it's believed there are new optimized SIMD instructions. If you think Apple uses this same CPU in any of their products, you're severely mistaken. The GC system is architected around the principle of high efficiency, low latency memory access. As such, the "Flipper" GPU uses embedded DRAM for local memory and 1T-SRAM for main memory.

You know what all that technology I just mentioned has in common? You won't find any of it in a PC right now.

Now let's look at the XBox. The CPU is an Intel coppermine P3. Yeah, it has 128K L2 cache as opposed to its regular 256K, but AFAIK, there are no new instructions or registers or other modifications at all.

The nVidia chipset is designed around the classic north/south bridge PC architecture. Sure, they connect via a HyperTransport link, but that's only unique since it's a new AMD standard that we'll be seeing much more of in PC's in the near future.

The north bridge integrates a GPU that by all reports is virtually identical to a Geforce3. However, its vertex shader is believed to be more flexible, or was that the pixel shader? eh...

The south bridge has explicit support for hardware DD 5.1 encoding which is probably the only truely non-PC thing in the whole box. Except, oh wait, nVidia is providing that same south bridge in their nForce chipset for AMD based PCs and it links with the north bridge via HT as well. Coincidence?

The fact that an XBox is a slightly modified, highly specialized PC isn't necessarily a bad thing. But, it's just silly to try and paint the other consoles with the same brush.

Thats EXACTLY what Im saying! Thank you. Im responding to the brush off of the Box as an "upgraded PC". How is this a criticism? Its implying that the problems with Windows is inheirent in the hardware (see einTiers point #2). Windows crashes because every single program you install has its grubby little hands in the DLL. The problem with PCs isnt a hardware issue its the OS.

So I guess no one thought that was funny?

Nope.

I thought it was funny.

-Naan

Dreamcast stereotype (recent purchaser): Cheap bastard who wants a great gaming system and chokes at $400 for a system, extra controller, and one game.

That would be me!

me too...

Nah. Just forget about these people who post this kind of thing. Quickest way to shut them up is to ask them, "What's your point?".