Welcome to the inauguration of a new format here at Crash To Desktop. With The Good The Bad and The Ugly we will bring you a weekly review of the latest in gaming and tech, introducing you to the great and the downright rotten.
Firstly let me say I love my Xbox 360, not the PS3 and I will most probably own an Xbox One within a year or two of launch. I will, however, be buying a PS4 on the launch day and will be signing up for a pre-order after E3.
I’ll admit, I have not been playing many games recently and I did not watch the Xbox One announcement live. I have watched the full video and honestly I'm feeling very underwhelmed by the whole announcement.
Thats not to say that I am not interested in the console.
The Good
There are some things you can always guarantee with a Xbox and that is a solid foundation with some innovative tweaks. They were the first to introduce a fully fledged online console game store and network. They were the first to push what I define as proper motion capture technology (not requiring hardware on the user).Some of the technology that was displayed in the announcements was phenomenal and I look forward to viewing the various hacks used with the new Kinect on various hack sites.
I love the tight integration between the TV and games console, the idea of swapping from Games to TV and vice versa is a great one and I hope it becomes the ‘standard’ in the future. Assuming that Microsoft can get the contracts, this will put Microsoft in a place they have wanted to be for years, in charge of the living room.
I’m also very interested to see the Kinect become a household item rather than an expensive add on, and glad to see Microsoft pushing the boundaries of gaming in this sector. Most critics agree that the future of human machine interaction will be using gestures (Minority Report), and Microsoft are defiantly at the forefront of innovation in this section of the market. If only because their system does not require the user to wear some form of hardware.
As the console is developed by Microsoft you can guarantee the console will be basically a powerful PC in a box, as its predecessors always have been. You can therefore near enough guarantee the initial games will be of a very high quality. This is not something you have always been able to guarantee with the Playstation (e.g. Orange box) or Nintendo consoles (e.g. Sam And Max).Stuttering or graphical issues can ruin a gaming experience, and really knock users out of the gaming bubble all the good games immerse us in.
The Bad
The voice recognition looks interesting but I think it is a "feature" that will never work in the living room. What happens when multiple people are talking in the room or there is an argument over the channel to watch? Do we really believe that microsoft has voice recognition that will be able to tell the difference between regional accents or even pick out your voice when the kids are playing or the phone is ringing.I think the thing that bothered me the most about the xbox launch was that we barely saw any games. I understand that they will be saving this for E3 but is it just me that wonders why they only spent 1/3rd of the time talking about the games at a games console event?
A friend pointed out an interesting point about this this morning on the walk to work. The XBox, Playstation and to an extent the WiiU (for maybe some) will all play the same games, will look roughly the same, and will not have any major differences. Like the Android phone market this means that each of the manufacturers need to add what is called a USP (Unique Selling Point) to convince each buyer they are getting more than the others.Microsoft's USP before was the social aspect, the other consoles have finally caught up but Microsoft had Xbox live up and running before any other console, and even now is the benchmark all others are judged against. This time they are going for the whole living room and they have the opportunity to offer a great USP once again.
No matter how much they try to convince us, as it stands the Xbox One will have bad integration with TV, and this is for a few reasons. Microsoft will never be able to make it cost effective to have the One as an effective source for TV. I am a Sky subscriber and don't believe they or any other big providers will integrate it properly with the Xbox, which would make the TV capabilities greatly reduced.
I could be wrong, and I hope they prove me wrong but Apple and Google have been trying to unite all of this for years and are miles ahead of Microsoft.
So far no solid mention has been made of the UK integration. Microsoft is a US company, and as such they will focus on the US market. This is nothing new and other big tech companies do this (Google with play music, Apple with Apple TV services). The main items they showed off for the Xbox TV integration were american based TV interests, and when pressed about other markets a generic "some services" answer was given. This almost always means it will be a very underwhelming offering.
The Ugly
I loved the Xbox 360 styling, it took the original Xbox and made it more streamlined and looked like
a designer had thought about it. The Xbox One looks like it was designed to be placed as far out of sight as possible. I’m not saying it’s ugly, it’s just that it looks like the designer took a shoe box, painted it 2 tone black (a la iPhone 5) and then stood back and said “Gentlemen, my work here is done”Then there is EA and their new partnership; they said the same thing for the Wii U, filled their "contractual obligations" and abandoned ship when they saw the iceberg was about to hit big time. Ultimately only time will tell about the Xbox One but I for one want to see more, before parting with my hard earned money.
So what did you think of Microsofts unveiling of the Xbox One? Great success or depressing let down? Let us know in the comments below, or on Facebook and Twitter.
Web developer and major time waster (who prefers the term procrastinator). Callum spent years at university studying games development and now lives with his better half. They both enjoy playing various games from MMO's to classic retro titles like Golden-eye, Alex the kid and Metal Gear Solid.
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