Touching the Box
Finally, I got to experience the Xbox 360.
Mr. Moneyballs (my personal, internal nickname) went to pick up a cheap television at Circuit City this morning. My apartment is finally being sanctified with digital cable, and my roommates and I felt that there was no better way to enjoy digital cable than having a television on which to watch it.
The cable guy was scheduled to arrive as early as noon, so I forced myself to get up at 9am and trek to the Circuit City in Union Square. I got there at 9:30am, and it hadn’t yet opened. Fast forward 40 minutes, I’m full of coffee and a very disappointing Egg BLT. Au Bon Pain? More like Au Shitty Pain. Oh dip!
It was 10:09am, or as I like to call it, Circuit City-based consumer electronic shopping time. I rode the escalator to the main floor and there at the top, in all its green and white goodness was an Xbox 360 kiosk. Immediately forgetting about my quest for a cheap TV, I went over and started to have a 360 Xperience (LOL times infinity!). Some guy was playing Call of Duty 2, but that didn’t stop me from grabbing the other available controller and quickly getting to second base. The controller felt great—it fit the hand as well as a Gamecube controller, but with the heft—the gravitas, if you will—of an Xbox controller S. All of the action on the buttons felt natural.
When my turn came around, I got to some playin’. I pulled up Kameo: Elements of Power by Rare, where you play some sort of adolescent lesbian that can turn into a blue bear. I believe you are also Egyptian/Native American.
I haven’t played through a Rare game since Conker for N64, but my God, Kameo reminds me of their N64 games. Is this why we got so few Rare games in the PS2 Generation, because they were too busy figuring out how they could resurrect the Banjo-Kazooie genre—where hyper-cute lead characters get chased after by bald, ape-like enemies with one tooth—for the most powerful machine possible?
My first impression runs like this: why couldn’t this game have been done on the Xbox or Gamecube? Look at Psychonauts and Resident Evil 4—are you saying that there’s something essential about Kameo that would have been lost if done on the current-gen machines?
Switching over to the time spend with Call of Duty 2, it also looked pretty good, but it was running on an HD widescreen TV, something that I certainly don’t own. In the end, it looked like a regular Xbox game running at high-resolution… I just didn’t see the lighting and shading effects that one would expect with a next generation system. Sure, these are first generation games, but I wanted to be wowed… and when I first game off that escalator to see the guy playing Call of Duty 2, at first I thought it was a normal Xbox hooked up to a nice TV… is that worth almost a month’s rent (or 6 months rent if I get the nice TV)?
Granted, I only got to play for 10 minutes, but seeing as how getting into the 360 arena, even with only the core system and one single game, will cost me at least $360 (interesting that the core bundle plus one game adds up to $360…), I don’t see the technological leaps necessary to buy a whole new system.
I’m sure that I’ll be getting a next-gen system at some point, but the time I spent with the 360 today didn’t give me any reason to think that if I don’t adopt now I’ll be missing out on something spectacular. These games lack next-gen “wow” factor.
The lack of “wow” factor comes from the fact that the most powerful of current-gen systems, the Xbox is the first one to get a successor. And since the Xbox has only been out for less than four years, programmers are barely hitting its graphical peak as the 360 sweeps in.
Thus, the transition seems completely evolutionary—i.e. slow and barely noticeable. If Xbox can hit a 7, it looks like the first 360 games are hitting a 9. We had Windows 95 now we get Windows 98. Zip-to-my-fucking-lou-my-fucking-darling(-fucking).
With no technological gap between the last games of the current-gen and the first games of the next-gen, it leaves us with little room to get excited. From NES to SNES there was a decided leap— After all, the NES had plateau-ed technologically for quite a while before the huge bullet bill in Mario World for SNES came along and blew our minds. Same thing with the SNES to PS1/N64—the 2D systems hit their peak quite a while before the first 3D systems game along. There’d be no mistaking Tekken for an SNES game.
But as of today, I had to look twice to figure out if it was an Xbox or an Xbox 360. I’m sure the games will get more impressive, but right now it feels as though Microsoft is declaring this generation over prematurely.
November 9th, 2005 at 6:17 pm
I have to agree on all points. I played the 360 last week at Best Buy, and I was underwhelmed at best. With the way that this generation has been hyped, I was expecting the experience to be at least on the level of the NES-SNES transition. I used to go to the mall and wait in line to play the Super Nintendo at KB Toys.
Granted, that was 14 years ago, and I was 12 at the time, but it was less than six months ago that I took off two days of work and waited in line for 13 hours to see Episode III. So I don’t think it’s me.
I played “Call of Duty 2” for about five minutes. I can’t say it wasn’t entertaining, but I got the same impression; that it was basically the same as any old Xbox game. The controller was definitely top of the heap. $40 is a bit on the pricey side for any controller, but I’m tempted to get the USB version to play emulators on my computer, and then I’ll already have it for when I eventually pick up a 360.
When the SNES came out, even the early games went far beyond what the NES could offer. Graphically it was on an entirely different level, but I think that what was even more important was how the games got such an immediate jump in complexity. The NES had nothing like “Actraiser,” “Final Fantasy II,” or even “Super Mario World.” Even the PS1/N64 generation, with its fancy 3D graphics, didn’t really increase the variation and complexity in gameplay that the SNES brought.
This generation is purely evolutionary. It’ll start with marginally better graphics, and end slightly better than that. From what I’ve read about the systems’ capabilities, prettier games are about the best we can hope for.
I know I’ll eventually pick one up, but until somebody figures out how to easily mod it, I’ll probably stay away. By that time, I might own an HDTV and the games will hopefully look a little better than the Xbox 1.5 we’re getting now.