quote: Today marks the debut of Xbox Live, Microsoft's foray into the realm of online console gaming. Xbox owners who've been itching to challenge Paraguayan preteens to games of NFL Fever 2003 can now do so, provided they pony up $50 for the starter kit, which includes a year's subscription to the service and a telemarketer-style headset for talking smack. Judging by the enthusiasm of beta testers, Xbox Live will snag its share of fans among hard-core gamers. It may even nudge the odd Christmas shopper away from a rival system and toward an Xbox. But for all its hype, Xbox Live shows little promise of ending the Microsoft console's status as an also-ran to Sony's PlayStation 2, which holds roughly a 70 percent market share.When Xbox launched last November, gaming geeks marveled at the Nvidia graphics processor and 8-gigabyte hard disk. But Xbox has never quite caught on, forcing Microsoft (which owns Slate) to make a humiliating downward revision of its sales estimates this past summer. By year's end, Xbox will account for just 12 percent of worldwide console sales, less than a fifth of the PS2's haul. Explanations for the discrepancy are plenty: Sony got a 13-month head start, Xbox's controllers are too cumbersome, blockbusters such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City are PS2 exclusives. Too seldom mentioned, however, is Microsoft's failure to understand a basic tenet of the console world: Cool matters, and Xbox isn't cool.Microsoft has never before needed to go through the motions of building a hip, edgy image
quote:Originally posted by Refalm:[Off-topic]I think those rappers from Xzibit love Linux... they made it very clear that they don't like text mode, but X, because they shout X all the time.[/off-topic]
quote:It's always cool to see a company owned by Microsoft turning against them. And they're absolutely right. One detail was wrong, the rapper Redman is using a Xbox, I saw it on TV... the rest all use PS2. I know all the celebrity's does, I saw Tom Green playing GTA 3 on the PS2 a week ago (he odly calls his PS2 "the GTA").XBox will never be cool... the box itself looks like a big plastic black box with green logo's. I think they've tried to make it look as cool as the PS2, but the thing is that they've failed badly.Microsoft chose the wrong colours for there console, and the wrong size of controllers.
Gosh, I love Linux Quake.
Computer security is very much like home security - you can take as many security precautions as you like but if you leave windows open, sooner or later you'll get broken into. - (Calum 2003)