Articles, notes and random thoughts on Software Development and Technology
It wouldn’t be a Microsoft product if it didn’t include some special ‘features’. What features am I talking about? The hangs, error messages, blank screens, reboots.
It’s only been out on the market for a couple of days and the reports of crashes are already streaming in – check out the posts on the Engadget website.
So far not so good for Microsoft. The intial reviews are lacklustre and people are recommending to hold off buying a shiny new 360, for the timebeing at least.
A quick search on Google for ‘XBox 360 review’ brings up the following:
So what’s going wrong? Did Microsoft take a gamble getting the new console to market early ahead of Sony’s PS3 (which may not appear for several more months), only to end up with a mediocre line up of games? Possibly. We probably haven’t seen what the new 360 can really do yet, and that will be 6 months or so, or even upto a year before the software houses are getting to grips with the new hardware and can produce a game that will really show what the console can do. But by that time the PS3 may be on the shelves, and then the game changes yet again as the attention may swing in the other direction to be all eyes on the shiny new PS3…
At the recent SC05 show, a industry show for those in the market for big iron, the AMD Opteron was apparently all the rage and the main topic for show floor talk.
Losing out to all this interest is Intel’s Xeon processor, which apparently is not doing to well in the large end server clusters, which of course was its intended market.
Check out the picture of the logo on the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer box…
So the XBox360 is now on shelves in the US, and will be on shelves in Europe in 2 weeks. Although the hardware is pretty awesome (although not as awesome as the spec for the upcoming PS3), the new console is still missing anything considered a ‘killer game’.
The original XBox made it based on the success of Halo. Halo was the killer games for the XBox which arguably generated more XBox sales than any other game. The XBox360 is currently lacking that killer game. Hardcore gamers are going to buy the new console ‘just because’, but in order to acheive deeper market penetration there has to be at least one awesome game, and from the reviews as summarized on The Register, it is just not there yet.