MICROSOFT UNVEILS X-BOX

Recently some pics of X-Box have leaked onto the net prior to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and now that as of Saturday, Bill Gates himself has unveiled the product and shown us more of the Microsoft "vision" we can compare the console and components to the competitors. So far X-Box has been quite a mystery, only rumors and conjecture and insanely unlikely specs haunted it's very presence on gaming sites. 300 Million Polygons? Uh huh, I'll believe that when I see it. Well as it were Microsoft did lower that figure to 150 Million Polys recently, and the GPU will only be 250 Mhz instead of the previously touted 300 Mhz.

The X-box console itself looks remarkably like the Playstation 2 and the Gamecube rolled into one. It has a front loading DVD-Rom Drive, Controller Ports on the front, and rear ethernet connection. The main casing is in the form of a big letter X, woo I'm impressed...-_-. I've got to admit though, it's not as TV Appliance (i.e. DVD player) looking as the Playstation 2 and it isn't as childish as the Nintendo GameCube, but overall the system seems to fit somewhere inbetween.

The Controller looks suspiciously like the Dreamcast Controller, hmm, they even used the same button color and lettering. It almost seems that it's like someone inserted the Dreamcast Controller, The Sony Playstation Analog Dual Shock, and sprinkled it with a little Nintendo GameCube Controller in a morphing program on a PC and came up with that. The Big Green Thing in the middle doesn't do anything. The memory cards load into the front of the controller like the dreamcast controller. You know... Doesn't it say Microsoft CE on the front of my Dreamcast? Why yes it does, it does say that. So these guys not only ripped off the idea and dropped support for the Dreamcast, they singlehandedly stole the look of the Dreamcast controller as well. I don't know, Video Gamer X, smells something a little rotten here but I can't as of yet put my finger on it. As a gamer, if I buy the X-Box will I just become another sell out to the Regime of Microsoft, and the almighty God of computers, Bill Gates so I can push his wealth deep into the hundred billions. I still don't know how much this things is going to cost. $400, $500? Every new copy of Windows is always overpriced at it's lofty $100 consumer price tag and a couple grand for Window 2000 Professional Edition so it makes me wonder. Will I pay that high price for X-Box, probably not, will I pay $300 for it? If the games look good and play good, then I probably will, sad to say. Either way Bill Gates and his golden cash cow win anyway. I hate to say this, but this is getting old, this guy and his company has just too much of a Monopoly on stuff. The odd thing of it is though, we do owe much of the computer revolution of the 90's to the nerdy guy and his steamroller of a company. I'm so far a little skeptical of where Microsoft thinks it's going with X-Box considering much of their gaming efforts on the PC are just not legendary.

One thing that pops into my mind about X-Box is wether or not I will have to be a freaking computer programmer to work it? I mean, it took me awhile to learn all the functions and features of Windows and Microsoft this and Microsoft that, so it stands to reason that all is not what it seems with X-box. Will I have to keep paying money upgrading to get X-Box ver. 2.2.0? I just don't want to have to configure the buttons on my controller every time I want to play a new game, or format and defrag the hard drive, or download patches to busted games or security holes in the software, maybe I'll get error like (one of my favorite) "Your X-Box Game System has performed an illegal operation - this program will be shut down [Cancel] [Ignore]", or watch it crash and burn like Microsoft's other less stellar products like that piece of crap, WebTV. I have one of these, (I'll refrain from telling you how and why I have one) and I've got to say if this is any indication of the programming power that is going to be behind the X-Box then I would avoid the thing like the plague. The WebTV console is a piece of crap, it locks up on sites with SSL, or the box powers off, they give it faulty upgrades that crash the box and make it say "fetching cache" and render it unusable. The service is very slow and webTV service POPs are down a lot and their silly Bryant servers crash so that customer's cookies get erased, corrupted or unusable and/or cause the service to say "webtv can't be contacted try again later" for like a week. They tell all the phone service reps who have to deal with customer complaint after complaint "we don't have an estimated time of resolution" and pretty much leave everyone hanging. This is a little known Microsoft hardware product that I have intimate knowledge of, and I honestly have to say, that WebTV sucks bigtime!

Will the X-Box be a gamers paradise or a nightmare? I don't know honestly. I'm going to wait on this one. I may wait past the release date to buy it in lieu of what sifts out of the initial foray. I have this odd suspicion that this will be another overpriced novelty console like the Jaguar, and the 3DO, plauged with a possible recall and malfunctions. Maybe I'm pessimistic, maybe I'm just suspicious, but by damn I have cause to be considering the source of this product. I hope all my comments are in fact unfounded. I would love to see more wonderful and exciting games. I hope it's a success, but right now I kind of forsee the best system in the console wars probably being GameCube if the big N can get out of the kiddy set and into the mature gamers. If titles like Metroid, Zelda, Mario, and Action Titles by Rare make their bold appearance the GameCube could take the industry by storm. We'll just have to wait and see, won't we.