So Far-So Good. I usually wait some time to discuss electronics reviews because it usually takes some time practicing with a unit to understand what it’s all about. Unlike most Microsoft bashers out there; I decided to give Microsoft the benefit of the doubt and see for myself whether the product was all hype or actually delivered where it said it would. Let’s get down to the basics.Microsoft’s Xbox 360 is Microsoft’s ps3 and PC killer. It came out with a humongous advertising campaign and came out probably a bit early to try and beat Sony to the market first. This rush caused a handful of hardware glitches for consumers which sadly was to be expected when trying to rush a product to the market as quickly as possible.Here’s the highs and lows:

Highs:

Stylish Design
Great interface
Powerful Hardware Slick Controller
Nice variety of games
Strong Online Play

Lows:
Too much hype for its own good
Price
Upgradeable electronics needed
Useless Extras
No next-gen media format included
No killer App. yet.

Let’s get right to it. The system is bashed by some but others like me have grown to enjoy it. It’s white and shiny and trying to copy Apple’s Ipod look. The other neat part is that you can customize it with face plates. While someone like myself might not enjoy that type of thing; I applaud Microsoft for at least trying to make the system customizable and for attempting to get girls into the system who might enjoy changing the design of the system around. The system’s interface reminds me less of Microsoft and more of Tivo with its easy to use guides and colorful display settings. The weight of the system (which was a problem with the original xbox) hasn’t seemed to change as it’s still quite heavy to lift up.

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While a lot of fuss was made over the the new consoles that will arrive in 2005-2006; there were also some games that were unveiled that will be hitting the store shelves very soon. Since I love lists, I will count down the top 10 games to look forward to for the upcoming holiday season. Also note that this list includes games that were playable on the show floor and doesn’t include games that were shown in trailer format and thus won’t include many xbox 360 or playstation 3 titles in this list. I will reserve judgment on those titles for a later date.

10. Burnout Revenge

What can be more fun than smashing cars into each other at 200 miles per hour? We aren’t quite sure but what we do know is that Burnout Revenge will be coming out soon and is the successful sequel to Burnout 3 that came out last year. This year you can look forward to new races,new rage modes and a new mode that allows you to try and beat the clock during rush hour traffic. We can’t wait for this one to come out very soon.

9. We Love Katamari

The biggest surprise of 2004 is back with the same fun loving weirdness we’ve came to expect from Katamari. The biggest feature this year for gamers is the addition of multiplayer support in which players will be able to play with one another in a two player co-operative mode.

8. James Bond 007: From Russia With Love

You might be asking yourself,another bond game, so what? Well this year EA decided to take a different approach and go retro by bringing back the old bond, Sean Connery in this 60s era bond title. You can expect great features like movie-based missions as well as original, action-intensive sequences, multiplayer and of course hot new bond girls to look at. (more…)

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E3 has come and gone once again and while typically the games are the highlight of the event; this year they were overshadowed by the next generation of systems. Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo all showcased their next generation systems and all 3 systems seemed to have their highs and their lows. Let’s run down each system and see which one was the clear winner.

Sony’s Playstation 3

Sony began E3 with their press conference and had little marketing campaigns to speak of before the event. It didn’t seem to matter though, as Sony by far had the best press conference for their system at E3. The hardware specs. for the playstation 3 were unbelievable and the addition of the new Blu-Ray technology for dvds and games will change the way that consumers buy movies just like the dvd helped to move technology away from vhs movies in the past. The playstation will also play all previous movie formats from dvd disks to cd roms as well as the complete playstation game library going all the way back to playstation 1 games.

Here’s a brief look at some of the hardware specs:

CPUCell Processor
PowerPC-base Core @3.2GHz
1 VMX vector unit per core
512KB L2 cache
7 x SPE @3.2GHz
7 x 128b 128 SIMD GPRs
7 x 256KB SRAM for SPE
* 1 of 8 SPEs reserved for redundancy
total floating point performance: 218 GFLOPS (more…)

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