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State of the Industry - The Ramblings of a Nintendo Fanboy #5 - By Link

by rawmeatcowboy
14 December 2005
GN 1.0 / 2.0

StateOfTheIndustry

Xbox 360 launches…

The Xbox 360 was launched and we are now living in the next generation world!

Um…

yay?

I wanted to allow some time to pass before I wrote this article. This way, most of the people reading this should have had a chance to play the Xbox 360 and the games made for it. Most of you are like me and played it in some sort of retailer with the attached high definition television set it was hooked up to in order to get the most out of the software. The one immediate negative to experiencing this system in this manner is that you don’t get to see the new Dashboard and Xbox Live for all its worth and that truly is a bad thing, honestly no sarcasm here.

Now, maybe its because I am a Nintendo fanboy or maybe its because I like change, I am just not happy with the Xbox 360. Its hard to be excited about a souped up Xbox when the company I follow is out to change the way I interact with videogames. Like so many have said before me, the Xbox 360 is not revolutionary, its evolutionary in that its not reinventing the wheel, its refining it and while this all sounds good, is this what we want? 5 more years of the same games with pretty graphics? Honestly, I don’t care how many enemies the new processor allows you to display on the screen in Ninety Nine Nights or Kameo, its Gauntlet all over again but in 3D with high definition graphics.

It is also upsetting playing Call of Duty on the Xbox 360 and also on a high end PC because the games are basically the same. For the last few console launches, we have seen the consoles be more powerful than the computer counterparts when it launched but this is simply not the case with Call of Duty. Tony Hawk suffers the same fate but instead of looking like a high end pc, it looks like an ex-gen Xbox title.

Since all of the users or the previous Xbox are more than used to, the new Xbox Live is basically the same as before except this time they add the reputation and stat trackers. You are still doing co-op, deathmatch, races against high score ghost, meeting other people in a MMORPG, yada yada yada.

Now I am not saying that I am upset that Microsoft didn’t try and reinvent the wheel because it would’ve taken the focus away from Nintendo who is trying to do something different but you have to give me something newer than better graphics and the same game. I guess I am old school and believe that no game should be multi-platform across two generations of a console (Madden 06, Tony Hawk American Wasteland, GUN, etc) because it shows that the game you are playing on the next-gen system is virtually the exact same game you are playing on your ex-gen system except (in this case) high definition graphics.

I will give Microsoft credit in the Xbox Live innovations they brought about because downloadable content, the marketplace (which I don’t like but at least its new), and the Xbox Live Arcade are actually new and (kinda) exciting features but really, find me innovation in any of the Xbox 360 games in terms of gameplay and I will give you a cookie.

Ok people, before you yell at me for all the inaccurate information I supposedly used in this article, I need your help. Give me a topic that I can (rant) discuss in my weekly State of the Industry. I will give you credit for giving me the idea and forward at least half of the hate mail in your general direction. Send me a private message with our ideas and I guarantee I will use them especially if they give me that special feeling that I get when I feel a rant coming on.

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