Mr Q - "Anybody know the phone number of a company that can send dozens of theme park mascots to a person's house for a day or two?"
And by theme park mascots I assume you mean Escorts right?
XBox-(we)Won is coming out with outdated system spec: 500GB HD that is supposed to have ALL your BluRay (25 GB each) games installed on it permanently? They are not crystal on that yet, but still. M$ patted itself on the back when they announced the console boots up instantly, which means that the drive is just a SSD. For those that have not encountered problems with SSD tech, well, just bite me. I am not saying they are all going to be ticking time-bombs, but if you did not know that at least 5% are ready to fail within the first four months, you might be a little surprised by your $500 door-stop and the month turn-around-time to get a refurb with an even greater chance of failure. $ony will only say the drive is 'large', which means nothing since a large drive to most of us is 4TB. If it too is an SSD and requires games to being fully installed then in a head to head death match they will be equally equipped. Gods (all of 'em) help them if they use certain types of SSDs where the failure rate reaches 30%+.
Both consoles come with an AMD 8-core CPU, it is a well known fact that Intel performs far better with games and AMD is for work. Both refuse to tell us how fast the CPU are. You might think that 8 cores is much faster than 6 but it usually does not mean very much (even when properly threading across all cores). So a 6 core from intel is almost certainly faster for game processing needs, but not as cheap. Neither mention the Video Card or GPU, so we wait...
M$ is going to use the old, slow, cheap, DDR3 while $ony is using GDDR5 which is graphical memory, not system memory. So they seem to be staying with their current plans, with $ony games looking better, but having less 'stuff' in the game world (without nuking the graphics to compensate) and M$ games having more/larger game worlds, but not quite as pretty.
But the most telling aspect of M$'s is that they are not even planning to phase out the 360's. Well that is confidence personified. Actually it was their way of covering their asses for *nothing* from the 360 working with the (we)Won. Games I understand, after all the new CPU has finally joined the last generation and moved up to 64 bit processing. But that does not explain why in hell the controllers do not. Sure the new ones are going to have extra features, but if you were to use an old one, it should just ignore those new features, right? Not according to M$ who tell you how great the new controller is with all the magnetic sensors and vibrating buttons (no, I am serious), but they conveniently skip the part where this is going to drain your AA cells faster than ever before (my guess is 4 hours).
Then we find out that the M$ says that SP games do not require you to be online persistently. Well, that is unless the designer really wants to make use of the console. Then they are going to need cloud processing, which is persistent online only. So the games *do not require it*, but they are going to suck Dolphin tail without it. But that is all the developer's fault according to M$. I expect $ony will duplicate this, so get ready internet providers. Bandwith caps for everyone! Suddenly that console is costing a hell of a lot more per month...
The (we)Won will allow developers to record data through the kinect, which they can force on through their game even when not actually using it as part of the game. Ostensibly this is so they can 'gauge your enjoyment level' according to M$. The best part is that now hackers can tunnel through the cloud anonymously and spy on you. It is not like someone does not penetrate M$ on a yearly basis (whether they need it or not). So I am thinking of launching a new business selling kinect hoods, with acoustic dampening foam, so you can disable this unless you are actually using it. The product name: Dis.
"Besides all of this, Microsoft is promising a new operating system fusing Xbox and Windows." Ya, it was called Windows 8. They had to flop it off on someone.
