Quote:Original post by silencer-
Yes, umm, a couple saved minutes for overall hours of gaming.

Try an hour at least, for a reasonable-sized group of people. Getting to the event and sitting around for an hour with your thumb up your ass: priceless.

Quote:monitors are not the size of TV screens.

And that's why most video cards come with a TV-out now. Huzzah for common sense!

Quote:have you ever tried those "two-player" games using one keyboard? That's right, they're almost impossible to play. Switching to controllers is not a viable solution, try using one in any precision-based game.

Like, say, Halo, probably the most fun you can have at a LAN party? Riight.

That last one was me. Dunno what happened

In the interest of not sounding like an idiot and damaging my rating even more, I'm just going to withdraw from the conversation. It's interesting that our respective experiences are so different.

Quote:1) At least an hour of fucking around with IP addresses,

hmm.. in my vision i see a hundred people all having set a fixed ip because of the annoying habit of windows to boot forever if you dont.. of course all using the same "guide" and therefor ip and half of them strictly refusing to touch their configuration because they are or feel to be too clueless to undo the changes afterwards and are afraid nothing will work anymore.

but then, im kind of out of touch and couldnt remember having read anything about xbox or ps2 "lan" parties *g*

but that rating system sounds fun. so i take it we would soon see all shops and sites saying "todays highend level: 4325" and people wondering "if this system is 4273, is that MUCH slower?"

not to mention that most of the current systems you get might be a high level in terms of cpu speed and ram, but utterly useless in terms of graphics card (if its not just onboard anyway) and often scarily crappy in terms of quality of components.

and what about games that give a damn if you got 500mhz or 10ghz because all they need is the latest graphics card anyway (basically every shooter that isnt anything but neat graphics)?

will they "motivate" companies to stop selling single components to end users and instead become mere suppliers of other companies doing nothing but taking a lot of money for plugging a into b, installing a completely unconfigured os (windows of course) and throwing away all manuals and cds? basically making them more expensive and limiting them to "10 shades of pc" because microsoft more or less decided that consumers arent just too dumb to be bothered with handling an os manually but also to use the damn web and get some info on the stuff before they dump a lot of money for it?

as long as this system will be _in addition_ as help for those that cant be bothered to inform themselves its fine with me. but looking back i hardly see microsoft happy with being just an option, unless they are the ONLY option.

Its pretty appearant that MS wants hybridization to some extent. I made a fairly long post about it here I don't think that its a necesarrily bad idea; Its one of those ideas that could be done absolutely brilliantly, or so horribly that it is scrapped for all eternity.

Ideally, I'd like to see this - Beginning with Xenon, windows PCs meeting a Xenon-compatiblility spec are able to play Xenon games. Xenon itself is essentially a low-cost entertainment PC, primarily for your TV, but with the reported DVI inclusion could just as well be used like a computer at a monitor. Xenon developers need to be able to have keyboard/mouse input at their disposal, since it would be the prefered input device on the Xenon-compatible PC in many game types.

The Xenon-PC has some benefits over a Xenon unit itself: Though typical installs are a thing of the past, Xenon-PC caches your last played games (user selectable number or specified disk useage) so you can get to the action quicker, Xbox already does this with the last played game. Alternatively, you can copy a disc image to your HDD and it will always be availble for quick play, in any event, its not required that games be installed. Copy protection becomes a bit of an issue, they probably have some plans for their Palladium system or whatever its called now, but failing that, having the disc in solely for copy protection is no worse than the situation as it is now. Patches and content downloads could be handled as they are on the Xbox, no problem there.

As for compatibility between Xenon (PowerPC) and PC (x86) I see 3 options a)Xenon games ship with binaries for each platform b)use "fat binaries" which contain code for both platform or c)use .net binaries which would incur a performance hit, but is more future proof if they move to yet another architecture later. MS is really pushing .net as the wave of the future so it wouldn't be entirely suprising. Microsoft will have to work tightly with vendors to make sure their latest PC upgrades maintain compatibility with the Xenon-compatibility spec, but I don't think it would be too difficult since the lack of support would be suicide if other vendors were supporting it: convince one and the rest will follow.

Personally, I play maybe 3-4 PC games regularly, of the 20ish I have installed. Thats a HUGE WASTE of disk space, I would love the option of running less-frequently used games from a disc in a no-hassle manner.

I think this can be done in a way that compliments both platforms, A Xenon is cheap (compared to a full PC) and is at home in the family room, it will play games exactly as well as every other Xenon unit which is the spec Xenon games will shoot for. A Xenon-PC is a little more versitile, being able to cache and "install" disc images, and if you've got a newer Xenon-compliant graphics card maybe you can turn up the resolution, detail, or get a few more FPS out of the deal (but honestly, I'd love to break out of the constant upgrade-cycle of PC land.) It still functions as a PC as well, PC games as we know them won't go away, but I would see alot of manufacturers opting for the Xenon route if it gained steam. Of course, they're free to do a vanilla PC version as well.

This would give consumers alot of choice. People own PCs just to play games, if they could get the exact same experience (sans installs) out of a $300 Xenon they would be better off. Another person uses his PC for work and games, and is upgrading their hardware every two years to keep pace, but they don't really need a Geforce 6 and 3.6 ghz CPU to do their work and browse the web! This person could get a Xenon-PC knowing it will meet the standard for the next 5 years until Xbox 3 comes out, or buy a cheaper, basic PC to do his work and a Xenon for games. Another guy might have a Xenon-PC for work and most single-player games, and a Xenon in the family room for the kids, or for when the buddies come over to play nfl 2k6. A Xenon-PC would be a very complimentary companion to Xenon, combined marketshare would be so huge that publishers couldn't pass it up, and a Xenon-PC doesn't have to be a loss-leader the way a console does in the beginning, all those extra liscensed games sold to Xenon-PC users are pure profit for MS.

As I said, it can be done brilliantly. Microsoft has the uphill battle of 1) DOING IT BRILLIANTLY and 2) Convincing everyone that it really is as brilliant as it is. Such a huge paradigm shift is bound to be met with skepticism and its going to take some work bringing people around to this sort of vision.


Whether or not it will actually happen remains to be seen, but I'm nearly certian MS would want to bring this together if they can. With XNA, the rollout of Xbox Live for PC coming and the PC/Xenon input device standard they seem to have all the tools laid out.