Hey guys im am here to beg you as a gamer to experience the xbox fall 2001. I think we can all agree the xbox has the better graphics. (if not it would be embarrasing for me to set the early screens from the ps2 aside the early screens of the xbox side by side) What about gameplay. That is what truly matters right? arddrive will enhance gameplay to levels we have never seen before. Im sure you all have heard of amped? It will have 120 tracks, 100 songs and you will have the option of burning your own songs on the game all compliments of the hardrive. What do you say? ps2 has a hardrive addon. Addons are considered successful if 10m percent of ps2 owners buy one. Will that be enough to sway developers to utilize it. Hell no. The very reason why ps1 had very few 4 player games. Well enough with me lets see what the real pros think.
Xbox: The Hard Drive Advantage
The 10 ways a built-in hard drive makes the Xbox a better videogame console than the PS2.
Even though the Xbox may not currently have the games to compete head-to-head with the PS2 (remembering, of course, that at this time last year, an even less exciting group of games supported the PS2), Microsoft\'s console does have one distinct and incredibly important advantage over Sony\'s juggernaut. And we\'re not just talking about horsepower.
The key advantage that the Xbox enjoys over its toughest competitor is a built-in hard drive. No other console maker has dared include this feature, but it\'s likely to become standard issue in the near future. Here are 10 reasons why.
10. The Hard Drive Comes Packed In The Box
It doesn\'t matter what Sony does with its proposed hard drive add-on, it will never saturate the market. Typically a peripheral is considered a rousing success if it can crack 10% of the installed console base -- that\'s why developers rarely support new peripherals.
Even if Sony is able to deliver a low-cost hard drive expansion for the PS2, it will almost certainly never be in even half the homes of PS2 owners. Because of this, don\'t expect game developers to get behind it full force.
On the other hand, when a game is made for the Xbox, the developer knows that 100% percent of Xbox owners have a hard drive, so it can be used whenever necessary. That\'s a key element to remember as we look through the following points. The developers will take advantage of the hard drive, simply because they can.
9. The Hard Drive Will Enable Users To Improve Games.
If you\'ve ever played Half Life: Counterstrike or one of the many, many mods created for Quake, Unreal, Half Life and just about any other first-person shooter ever made, you know that users can actually improve great games by creating mods and variations the developers never thought of.
The Xbox hard drive can store up to 8GB of data, which is way more than enough to support any level editors and toolkits needed for the mod community. This community consists of the ultra-hardcore gamers who chose the PC over consoles because of its customizability. Now they\'ll have a home on a console, and even the casual gamers will benefit from their work.
8. The Hard Drive Will Enable Developers To Improve Games After They\'ve Shipped.
Okay, we\'ve all suffered through game patches and the unfinished games that needed them, but we\'ve also benefited from developers tweaking and improving games through patches.
On a console with no hard drive, this is logistically impossible -- but with a built-in hard drive, developers know that if they work hard to improved a released product, everyone who wants to upgrade their games can and will, thanks to the hard drive.
7. The Hard Drive Will Make Memory Cards A Memory.
At one time or another, most of us have misplaced a memory card that we desperately needed. The hard drive will make the storage and labeling of these cards virtually unnecessary. Even Sony\'s massive 8MB card can easily be overfilled with data, requiring a purchase of a second card.
It will be a long time before any of us fill up an 8GB drive with save files.
6. The Hard Drive Will Enable Developers To Create Far Larger Levels Than Ever Before.
The Xbox hard drive can serve as a scratch-disc for games. Most console games load information directly from the disc into the RAM as the game progresses. The Xbox, on the other hand, loads the first bit of information into the RAM and then can load more information directly onto the hard drive. Because the processor can access the hard drive much faster than any disc, the Xbox can process information from the massive hard drive to create insanely huge levels that don\'t need to be broken up into tiny loading zones.
Imagine a game like Metal Gear Solid 2 or Shenmue that doesn\'t need to cut its gorgeous levels into small loadable chunks but keeps them the size of a real city. Or think about what a racing game could be like if the track could be as massive as Ohio. The hard drive makes this and more possible.
5. The Hard Drive Will Open Up Game Recording Possibilities.
Because players have an 8GB storage unit, they will be able to do things never before imaginable in console games. For instance, sports game aficionados could store their favorite plays on the hard drive and see them show up after the game in a SportsCenter-like presentation.
Players could also record screenshots and videos of any games they play and put them on the Internet later on. We could even see movie-making software possibilities. How many gamers would love creating their own CGI animated movie shorts?
4. The Hard Drive Will Enable Developers To Create Rich, Evolving Worlds.
One of the main reasons that console videogame worlds are so bland and unchanging is that developers simply have nowhere to store all the information that a constantly evolving world needs. For instance, a hard drive would enable developers to create worlds that can be permanently affected by users.
Imagine an RPG forest that is scarred and damaged by a battle early in the game. With the hard drive, you could return years later in game time and still see some remains of your battle. The hard drive will enable developers to create much richer worlds that change according to whatever the player does. The possibilities are pretty endless, and we could soon see more complex simulations than we\'ve ever seen on a console before.
3. The Hard Drive Could Make The Xbox A Useful Entertainment Tool.
For starters, you could store a lot of MP3 files on your Xbox hard drive, but that\'s just the beginning. As digital video recorders like TIVO and ReplayTV become more popular, we may quickly see uses of the technology on the Xbox. It\'s already connected to your television; why not use it as a recorder as well?
2. The Hard Drive Will Enable Developers To Use More Detailed Textures.
Most consoles (including the PS2) are extremely limited in terms of texture memory. The Xbox has a lot of memory, but it also has a built-in hard drive that will enable developers to first load the textures onto the hard drive from the disc and then load the textures into RAM. Better textures make games look better; add that to the Xbox\'s superior polygon engine and you\'ve got a winning combination.
1. The Hard Drive Means We\'ll See Massively Multiplayer Online RPGs.
Perhaps the most exciting new videogame genre of the last five years is the rapidly growing Massively Multiplayer Online RPG genre (MMORPG). Even though we know that several of these blockbuster games are in development for the PS2, they will all rely on the acceptance of a PS2 hard drive add-on.
Every Xbox will be ready for MMORPGs out of the box, and as this videogame genre continues to blossom, Microsoft will have a leg up on the competition in the console world.
Dan Egger
