You know, I'm not Microsoft's biggest fan. In fact, I'm really more actively engaged in despising them, most of the time. Windows, don't even get me started on it. Office? Ick. C#? Bleh. Windows Media (Player, formats, all of that) - godawful. Internet Explorer? One of the worst browsers on the market, totally UI rearranged in version 7 for no good reason. DirectX? I have no handle on whether it is, in itself, good or bad. I've never worked with it. But it's a proprietary set of APIs that makes porting to non-Microsoft OSes and devices unnecessarily difficult, so that's enough reason to dislike it. The Zune? Hahahahahahaha.
But their gaming division doesn't seem to be doing too badly. The original Xbox was nothing special, but it eventually became a serviceable enough console and I enjoy a fair number of games for it, as well as it being hands-down the console for multiplatform games. They've also got some fairly decent games under their belts, albeit mostly due to their habit of buying whole developers upon said developers achieving some sort of success.
And the 360? The console I was most down on coming into this generation? I love it. I really just got it to play the exclusive games - Dead Rising, Perfect Dark Zero, Enchanted Sonata, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, etc. You know the drill. But as happened with my PSP, it's turning out to be so much more. Achievements, of course, are a brilliant concept. I'm not sure how achievement-whory I'm liable to be - I suspect I'll probably ignore multiplayer achievements (other than coop ones on the same console) and anything that's very labor-intensive and out of the regular course of the game, as well as ones I simply don't have the skills to get. But they add extra spice to practically any game. It's a quite serviceable DVD player - far better than my PS2, and without the stupid extra expense of the Xbox's DVD capacity (I never sprung for it, thankfully.), although I'd like it if it had more direct button controls. Downloading demos and trailers and extra content is handy. Having all sorts of tracking for what I'm up to is a little Big Brotherish, but useful.
And then there are the things I discovered today: One, it connects to and plays music off of iPods. A total shock to me (Zune compatibility, to be expected...competing product? Not so much.), and something that would be really awesome. Of course, it doesn't seem to be working with my specific iPod. Hopefully I'll figure out how to fix that, or someone will tell me, either way. More significantly...it can stream media from my PC. Music, photos, videos...all of them go across my network easy as pie. The music is okay (saves me having to rip to the 360), but I'd rather use my iPod, since I keep most of my music on my Mac, which is *not* compatible. The photos...well, I never really understood the point of that feature to begin with, on my PSP or iPod either. But the videos...ohhhh, so nice. Full-screen TV video viewing, with proper controller button shortcuts, unlike DVD. Resume where you left off. Support for video formats that the internet community actually uses (unlike my PSP and iPod)!
Translation: I now have the ultimate way to watch pirated video.
But their gaming division doesn't seem to be doing too badly. The original Xbox was nothing special, but it eventually became a serviceable enough console and I enjoy a fair number of games for it, as well as it being hands-down the console for multiplatform games. They've also got some fairly decent games under their belts, albeit mostly due to their habit of buying whole developers upon said developers achieving some sort of success.
And the 360? The console I was most down on coming into this generation? I love it. I really just got it to play the exclusive games - Dead Rising, Perfect Dark Zero, Enchanted Sonata, Blue Dragon, Lost Odyssey, etc. You know the drill. But as happened with my PSP, it's turning out to be so much more. Achievements, of course, are a brilliant concept. I'm not sure how achievement-whory I'm liable to be - I suspect I'll probably ignore multiplayer achievements (other than coop ones on the same console) and anything that's very labor-intensive and out of the regular course of the game, as well as ones I simply don't have the skills to get. But they add extra spice to practically any game. It's a quite serviceable DVD player - far better than my PS2, and without the stupid extra expense of the Xbox's DVD capacity (I never sprung for it, thankfully.), although I'd like it if it had more direct button controls. Downloading demos and trailers and extra content is handy. Having all sorts of tracking for what I'm up to is a little Big Brotherish, but useful.
And then there are the things I discovered today: One, it connects to and plays music off of iPods. A total shock to me (Zune compatibility, to be expected...competing product? Not so much.), and something that would be really awesome. Of course, it doesn't seem to be working with my specific iPod. Hopefully I'll figure out how to fix that, or someone will tell me, either way. More significantly...it can stream media from my PC. Music, photos, videos...all of them go across my network easy as pie. The music is okay (saves me having to rip to the 360), but I'd rather use my iPod, since I keep most of my music on my Mac, which is *not* compatible. The photos...well, I never really understood the point of that feature to begin with, on my PSP or iPod either. But the videos...ohhhh, so nice. Full-screen TV video viewing, with proper controller button shortcuts, unlike DVD. Resume where you left off. Support for video formats that the internet community actually uses (unlike my PSP and iPod)!
Translation: I now have the ultimate way to watch pirated video.
Welcome to the Xbox 360 cult... er, "family"