10 things the Xbox 360 does wrong


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Why, yes, of course, there is nothing wrong with your Xbox 360 or Spartan's Xbox 360. But I don't think there are many people with those magical 360s :)

I'll let you do the math, but at most 30% have problems with their 360's. and some 14 million at least have been sold by now.

so what's 70% of 14 Million, that'show many have those "magical" xboxes, at least, assumign a worst case scenarion of the 3RROD issue.

and for the record, mine works just fine.

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I'll let you do the math, but at most 30% have problems with their 360's. and some 14 million at least have been sold by now.

so what's 70% of 14 Million, that'show many have those "magical" xboxes, at least, assumign a worst case scenarion of the 3RROD issue.

and for the record, mine works just fine.

You're taking my post out of context of the discussion it was involved in. Please re-read my first post of the page. Clearly I was not specifically talking about the RROD. I've never had that problem, and that's not what I was discussing.

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I agree with everything TBH, espicially 5. They can re-organize it all they want, but it's still vulgar.

XMB ftw.

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most of those points are from day 1, and if microsoft hasn't fixed them in the last 2 years, give up on trying to change the damn thing... it's xbox360, it's arguably the top selling next gen console.

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Guide Button, Y = Back to main screen.

Yes, but that process itself takes at least 5 seconds, if not more. The XMB, IMO, is very well designed at being able to quickly access things without opening a "blade" and going through window after window. Sorry, it looks nice, but not "ergonomically" designed, if you catch my drift. Not trying to promote the PS3, just stating what I feel.

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Ok, I'll make a real post about this I suppose.

1. Mass storage

It is, indeed, somewhat baffling as to why they chose this route. In the end it comes down to choice for the consumer. Looking back on it, I think they may have made the right choice. The consumer does get more choice, and can choose to spend less. On the developer side, the 360 doesn't seem to have been crippled in any way, shape, or form due to the lack of requirement of a hard drive. In fact, I'd go out of my way to say that it's games have seen less problems than games for other systems that do require Hard Drives.

I do have to agree that the pricing for these hard drives is pretty much absolutely ridiculous.

2. It crashes and it dies

This is a giant load of FUD, as the problems have been fixed. I don't know if anyone else has noticed, but every since MS claimed to have fixed the problems, I've been hearing quite a lot less RROD stories (and I'm willing to bet that most of the ones that do surface are using hardware from before the fix). It sucks that it started out that way, but MS did a great job coming through (despite how long it took) and providing a major warranty extension and fixing the heart of the problem for future production.

3. Noise

This is also a ridiculous statement. I think the majority of the people who've bought a 360 probably don't notice the noise. I'm betting the people that do complain probably stop noticing it when they start getting into a game. Same for DVDs.

4. You have to ?sign in? with controllers

I've not had a problem with this. Usually when people want to join me, all I have to do is load up a game and have them turn their controllers on and hit 'A' and they're in.

5. Its UI is vulgar

I disagree with this entirely. While XMB is impressive and very slim, the 360 Dashboard is very intuitive and pretty easy for an average person to get used to and use, and I think it looks great. And with the new update, it's wicked fast.

5a. Faceplates

As I mentioned earlier in the thread, this is the most ridiculous comment ever due to the fact that other people having faceplates has absolutely no bearing on them whatsoever.

6. Wi-Fi costs extra

For one, if you don't like the price, I hear CAT5 cables are pretty cheap. Second off, they complain about the addon like it's a giant honking thing that doesn't just plug into the back of your Xbox very nicely and conveniently. What the hell?

7. Multiple SKUs

There's no problem with this at all. I'm glad to have had the choice (although I really didn't, since the stores were sold out of Premiums when I went and bought m:pe :p). Not everyone wants the same options and upgrades even if they do want to play the same games. Not to mention that the 360 SKU's are pretty easy to understand and know what the differences are.

8. Format lock-in

This is just an idiotic statement entirely, as you can use 'Vanilla XP' to stream media to your 360 so long as you have Windows Media Connect or WMP11. Seeing as most people have that anyways...I don't see what the big deal is.

9. Xbox Live costs money

Not going to get into this again, suffice it to say that in my opinion, and my experience, it's been worth every penny for the last 5 years.

9a. Wallpapers and themes cost money.

I'll concede that it is rather astounding that that stuff costs some money.

10. Sheer bloody-mindedness

I'm not even sure their arguments here make any sense. If anything, their Xbox Div has done the most right in the last few years as far as business goes of any of MS' divisions. This is easily backed up by just looking at 360 sales numbers and attach rates for software and hardware. It's not a secrepeople love spending money on this console and there are plenty of good reasons why, not least of which comes down to the fact tMicrosoft has done something very, very right.

Is the Xbox 360 perfect? God no, but neither is this article.

-Spenser

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Ok, I'll make a real post about this I suppose.

1. Mass storage

It is, indeed, somewhat baffling as to why they chose this route. In the end it comes down to choice for the consumer. Looking back on it, I think they may have made the right choice. The consumer does get more choice, and can choose to spend less. On the developer side, the 360 doesn't seem to have been crippled in any way, shape, or form due to the lack of requirement of a hard drive. In fact, I'd go out of my way to say that it's games have seen less problems than games for other systems that do require Hard Drives.

How is it baffling?

They want, in 4 years, to be able to do what Sony is doing with the PS2 now. They want to keep it around, make it really cheap, so that the system can be a commodity. You can't do that with a hard drive. You can't make it smaller and you can't make (the hard drive) cheaper.

Then there's the $300 target launch price. The only other option for hitting that would have been to sacrifice some other component - namely, memory. As they've said, if all SKUs had included a hard drive, it would have had half as much RAM.

Now the price is nearly the same as the Wii, and just like the Wii it includes relatively small flash-based storage instead of a hard drive. But unlike the Wii, you can snap a hard drive onto it and gain all the advantages therein.

Plus, removing the dependency on a fixed hard drive makes it easier to offer different storage solutions in the future (flash memory, network storage, etc).

Finally, the claim in that article that the lack of a hard drive causes "texture popping" is absurd. One has absolutely nothing to do with the other. What they call "texture popping," like that seen in Mass Effect especially during cinematics, is the effect of Level Of Detail (LOD) adjustments in the game engine. ME has it in very much the same way that Halo 2 did on the orginal Xbox, because their LOD scale is tuned to gameplay, not in-game cinematics. During gameplay the viewpoint (ie. camera) doesn't instantly jump from one place in the world to another. But during cinematics it does, and this catches the game engine "off guard." Remember, Halo 2 was on the original Xbox with a fixed hard drive.

No, it has nothing to do with caching on the hard drive. That doesn't even make sense, as it wouldn't help. The only thing improved by caching to the hard drive really is loading time. And most games on the 360 do that, since it's not exactly difficult to code for both situations.

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The popping also occurs wether you have the HDD or not, and most xbox devs with any skill(and judging from ME Bioware has the skils) will program to take advantage of the HDD for cachign when it' available.

Texture popping has only to do with consscius game design decision due to the use of extrmeely high res textures wich require the use of streaming to fit in memory.

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The cosmetic points are all side issues it is a gameing machine, I for one think it is a fantastic bit of kit.

If you don't like it fine, If you prefer another console then fine.

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I think each of the points has SOME validity behind it, but I feel that they are being overly harsh and making a mountain out of a molehill in some instances!

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How is it baffling?

Slow down, most of my bit on #1 was defending Microsoft. I just meant that initially it seemed like a very odd choice for MS given the success of a dedicated drive inside the original Xbox.

@Huleboeren - your post is absolutely ridiculous, given that I think one person mentioned Sony, and I'm sure he didn't actually mean that he thought Sony wrote it :rolleyes:

-Spenser

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As some have already said, texture popping has nothing to do with the hard drive and whether it's available or not. The problems lies within UE3, and the 3 main culprits of texture popping being Gears, Rainbow Six and Mass Effect. The problem exists on the pc version of Gears as well as UT3.

As for the Dashboard, faceplates etc, that all comes down to preference of each individual owner. For me the Dashboard is easily the best menu of all 3 consoles. It may not have always had the best layouts and the past few months it has been very buggy (which has now been sorted with the fall update), but the speed, options and features available are next to none. Try using the PS3 or Wii online and the menu and speed go at a snails pace. It's an absolute disgrace. Even system updates take more than twice as long to perform.

Faceplates, yeah I can see why people hate them and it's a cheap way to make money. Some of them are actually very nice though, even if you don't end up using them on the console, they are cool collectors items. I've never bought a faceplate on it's own for the sake of changing the style of my 360, but I did buy the LE of Lost Planet which included a collectors faceplate and it looked great :)

RROD is a mute point to still bring up these days, and has been for the last 5 months. Sure it was stressful for owners, especially those who had multiple consoles break on them. MSFT took a huge hit to their wallets to correct the problem (even though they took their time over it), extended the warranty and refunded costs to owners who had RROD problems previously. We all know other companies have turned a blind eye to their unhappy customers and told them to buy another console as opposed to fixing it, so at the end of the day at least MSFT turned it around for the better in the end.

Never had any problems with controllers so again a mute point to me.

Wi-fi adapter is over priced, but there is alternatives out there which buyers can use. Again, I'm happy I didn't have to pay extra for the adapter as I wouldn't use it.

The fans on my 360 aren't loud at all, so again another mute point to me. The dvd drive can be noisy at times, but I generally don't notice except when I initially boot the console up. When I'm in game I don't hear it.

Edited by DrunknMunky
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Mass Effect, Forza 2, PGR4, Ace Combat 6, Assassin's Creed.

not shooters, not PC ports, and that's just the start. also use the same list for your second "point".''

Next time before you try to bas the 360, check what games it has, and go look at how they actually look.

Woah, 5 games in the X360 that are not FPS.

Impressive... maybe in 2 more years we will have 10 games in the X360 library that are not FPS.

PS. I'm talking figuratively.

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Woah, 5 games in the X360 that are not FPS.

That's probably more games than the total number of good PS3 games out, so I'd say we're doing pretty good.

Not to mention you're way overblowing the situation. Yes, the 360 is FPS oversaturated, but it does have a hell of a lot of great non-FPS games (other than the 5 he mentioned).

And I know you said you were talking 'figuratively', but then why talk at all.

-Spenser

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I think its these post that should be blocked. It's just biased, untruthful, opinionated, and holds little to no merit on basically everything it states.

He thinks 3 red lights is only due to overheating, which already shows his lack of knowledge on the product. OH NOES THE NOISE, who know electricity and moving parts could ever make a little bit of noise... it is only a 3 core computer in a 1'x.6' case lol. Binding controllers, oh noes, some way to make sure not just any device could interfer with my signals! Im done pointing out how little of an IQ this guy who wrote this has. He apparently has no life, spends that no life making accusations about things that have no matter or real claim.

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Yes, but that process itself takes at least 5 seconds, if not more. The XMB, IMO, is very well designed at being able to quickly access things without opening a "blade" and going through window after window. Sorry, it looks nice, but not "ergonomically" designed, if you catch my drift. Not trying to promote the PS3, just stating what I feel.

Hah! Both XMB and XBOX 360 UI are variations of the twist interface that Zune features as well. So Both are pretty much same UIs with different skins. Granted I don't have any experience with PS3 UI but thats what I felt when I tried it a couple of times.

Now I don't know who came out with twist UI first Sony or Microsoft (my guess is that it debuted on PMPs first). But why does it matter? XBOX360's UI IMO is better than PS3's and is universally accessible even when you are in game.

just my 2c.

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1. Mass storage

Agreed, not having the HD was a really poor decision and I do feel games have to thrash the disk more than they otherwise might have.

2. It crashes and it dies

Agreed. And the three year warranty only covers the three red lights...they were also talking mechanical issues and the like which while nowhere near as common are ones you hear enough about that they are an issue (and if the RROD wasn't so dominent I think the disk ones would be taken more to heart too).

3. Noise

Agreed, it's unacceptably loud

4. You have to ‘sign in’ with controllers

I havent had any issues here

5. Its UI is vulgar

The UI is fine IMHO but they've made some incredibly stupid decisions in regards to it to and I think thats primarly in relation to the marketplace and how it's setup. The lists for finding content are absolutly massive and slow to scroll through. For a company investing so much into search technology and having just released a keypad for the xbox, why isn't there a propper search function?

5a. Faceplates

I dont care...but I dont think it's a negative really

6. Wi-Fi costs extra

A ripoff indeed, but theres other solutions

7. Multiple SKUs

Multiple SKU's isnt really an issue except that the core and arcade now in not having a drive has really hurt. I wouldnt mind multiple SKU's, but I'd like them to be different in non-game related functions such as HDMI or the drive size as opposed to the absence of the drive completly. I'd be happy to see SKU's with wireless and HD-DVD drives for instance too.

8. Format lock-in

Not that big a deal IMHO

9. Xbox Live costs money

Not great and I dont think the service is better than what you get on other platforms for free, but the price isnt too bad either.

9a. Wallpapers and themes cost money.

Theres enough free ones....I have dozens of free ones. Not that big a deal/

10. Sheer bloody-mindedness

was a bit of a rant but Rare has under performed to date. Nothing that great to come out (yes that counts Viva) but then again nothing terrible either so hopefully they can turn around. I wouldnt call Rare a trainwreck at all and all their games have had potential IMHO but just missed the mark in enough ways to prevent the games being great. I find it odd Banjo has been quiet but I suspect we'll hear about it Jan / Jex for a late 08 release. I'd say it's been kept quiet to keep the focus on this XMas. Infact as far as MS exclusive titles go they have been quiet all round be it Halo Wars or Gow2.

Edited by Smigit
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Woah, 5 games in the X360 that are not FPS.

What is your problem? There may be quite a few FPS games on the system yes, but there are other good games aswell like the ones HawkMan mentioned.

Others;

Blue Dragon, Eternal Sonata, GHIII etc. Please take your PS3 fanboyism elsewhere.

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wait, when did FPS games become bad? whats wrong with having a lot of fps games? they seem to sell the best and be the games that people play the most out of any other type.... maybe thats what the ps3 is lacking, is FPS. Seems like all the non fps games are mostly rentals or short stories that people become bored of rather quickly. I dont see people playing mgs1 or 2 or god of war 1 or 2 as much as people play halo 2 or 3, or even a game like counter-strike.

FPS are here in a huge number because thats what people want. Racing games dont offer to much in the long run, and mostly all are the same game. Action games tend to run dry after you beat them, and many coming out are pretty short or just horrible stories you dont really care to play through.

I guess though when all the ps3 really has to bash on the 360 is its shear number of games and how many of them are fps, its not a bad thing. I think its just ps3 owners being mad that they only have like 10 games to choose from, and like 1 of those really only being worth owning.

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Woah, 5 games in the X360 that are not FPS.

Impressive... maybe in 2 more years we will have 10 games in the X360 library that are not FPS.

PS. I'm talking figuratively.

And PS3 is in such a good position to point the finger at another console and it's selection of games eh? Or are you forgetting two of the top launch titles for the PS3 were a FPS and driving game (Resistance and Motorstorm). Oh sh*t, yeah that's right!

It's funny how when the 360 offers these titles, it's nothing more than being an over saturated console with shooting/sport genres, but the PS3 launches with two of the same and hey look, "innovation!!1!".

And this month, what are gamers looking forward to most on PS3? Oh yeah!, Unreal Tournament 3! Another shooter!

:rolleyes:

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