BPX029: When M/$ Were Kings

[Digfox]

Listening to Phil Spencer recently I think MS are well on track to take the next generation by the horns whereas Sony are coasting a little bit and look like they might be lacking direction. If so it's the second time they'll be making that mistake (arrogance cos they're winning).

Yep. I think Spencer's comments on being 'underpowered' and 'overpriced' are telling. I think he gets such an important point. Assuming AMD aren't prioritising their rival and they can launch with comparable specifications, or ideally better, then they definitely have a chance in key markets they won in the the 360 days (i.e. North America, UK). But I agree you do get that sense for some of the recent interviews and decision they have made.

[CMcK]

The 360 is truly a great system.
Proper old school custom hardware with a genuine first with the unified shaders.
Some incredible games too like Gears, Halo, Vanquish etc.
And all those glorious shmups. Shooter fans hadn’t seen the likes since the MD and PCE.
But for me the 360s success is down to Xbox Live. XBLA and later XBLIG were a hotbed of great games and the monthly games with gold offerings have been pretty good too.
I fondly remember flying home from Las Vegas on the Sunday after launch. I got my bro to drop the good lady off at home then it was into town to collect my 360. Jet lag be damned. To be fair the launch was somewhat underwhelming. Perfect Dark was rubbish but PGR was much more like it. Good times playing online with the VGI guys.
Of course the system did the red ring and I forked out for the repair. Which MS did refund eventually. Weirdly my hideous Japanese Halo 3 model is still soldiering on.
I hope MS reflect upon the success of the 360 and the relatively less successful One and give us another great generation in the next few years.

[Neon Ignition]

The trouble for MS next time is that whilst they'll think "POWER!", it needs to be at a specific price point which the XBX proves £450 is too high for. You're quickly back in £350 territory which is fine but realistically the old days of different hardware are gone and the PS5 will likely weigh in too similarly for hardware to be a big factor in MS's position next gen.

It took Sony an entire generation of aggressive comeback to get back on top and MS has barely even scratched starting that road yet so personally the XB4 will be about turning the ship rather than being an outright hit. That's not counting MS's endless issue of too much of the EU, Japan and other territories having never given a moments care for the brand making toppling Sony practically something to rule out before they begin.

I do think MS can improve their position quite significantly next gen if they can get a decent system out at a decent platform and critically with steady coming good exclusives but on the other side of it I kind of feel they also need to find their own niche as well that marks them out against Sony just like Nintendo has. They've been too similar for too long and it makes it too easy for many to shrug them off for not offering much different than a brand that's now been trusted for approaching 25 years.

[nonny]

One of my favourite consoles ever mainly because it really coupled the best online network for gaming at the time with HD gaming... enough said.

Only now playing backward compatible titles on the Xbox One X do I actually appreciate just how many titles I loved on the 360 and how many I still want to replay. Good times.

[QualityChimp]

the 360 love on here!

Plenty of games I've yet to play. The BC feature on the One is definitely nice and making the Games with Gold 360 releases BC is great too because it does double the available games for One owners. I'm currently playing Portal 2 on BC, but I've spotted Dead Space 1 & 2 are on there.

I've said it before, but shinier graphics are nice, but I like it when they focus on the processing power of the console and how much it can handle. Games like Dynasty Warriors on the PS2 had loads of onscreen enemies, but they never felt a threat until you walked up and started hitting them.

The sight of Frank West in Dead Rising atop a truck surrounded by zombies was finally allowing me to fulfil my Dawn of the Dead game dreams. It's one of the main things that sold me the console.
I rinsed that game, even getting the achievement for killing the same amount of zombies as the town's populace.

[Neon Ignition]

As is the case with every single Xbox console, it was easy as pie to walk in to the store on launch day and pick one up without a preorder which is exactly what I did after a last minute cave. Picked it up with Kameo, Perfect Dark Zero, Call of Duty 2, Condemned and Project Gotham Racing 3

I didn't have a HDTV at the time, I think I ended up with a flatscreen and running it through VGA instead. It looked good but was the first time a new gen system had arrived and felt incremental on the previous gen's visuals. Despite the dingy art design Gears was really the first game to properly showcase the system. Overall though MS really did a phenomenal job learning from the XB and applying that into smart changes for the X360. For the first three years it was a great ride and my absolute go to for new releases.

It was only once Sony opened their eyes to being humble that things started to turn towards the PS3. Multiformats weren't as spot on for PS3 but they really started to hit a momentum in the second half of last gen that saw them stride past X360 as an experience and the arrival of Kinect really saw the rot start to set into MS's ship. Overall though it remains MS's best effort and a good system all round.

[QualityChimp]

It was only once Sony opened their eyes to being humble that things started to turn towards the PS3. Multiformats weren't as spot on for PS3 but they really started to hit a momentum in the second half of last gen that saw them stride past X360 as an experience and the arrival of Kinect really saw the rot start to set into MS's ship. Overall though it remains MS's best effort and a good system all round.

That's an interesting take, Supes, and again ties in with the title.
What did they do right/wrong to get them to the top of the console market?
Even if you think PS3 won last time it's debatable, but it's clear that, this gen, Sony is on top.

PS3 had an awful start. It was overpriced and undergamed.
I liked the jostling for consumer share over the years and outdoing each others' service.
What specifically are you thinking of that made the PS3 "stride past the 360 as an experience"?
The Kinect is an interesting one, because I can't fault MS for trying new ways to get people to play. It might not be your thing, but if people are having fun playing Just Dance, that's the point, right?
It worked for the Wii, so I can see why MS wanted a slice of that pie.

I find stories of companies that were GIANT household names that have folded or lost market dominance through bad business decisions fascinating. Toys R Us, Kodak, Blockbuster, Perrier, MySpace, American Apparel, Maplin, Rumbelows, Woolworths, AOL, Motorola, Yahoo, Netscape, Blackberry, Atari, Sega and so on.

I have flashforwards to articles talking about these companies and talking about the time when Microsoft used to make consoles, with that picture of Matrick unveiling the One and it signalling the beginning of the end.

[randombs]

Can we have an option between merely a good console and greatest console ever?

That's what I would've chosen.

Ahhh, the 360. It signaled the future of gaming with PGR3. I remember borrowing a Core console from work for the weekend, along with a couple of pads and PGR3. I was not too impressed when, having called my mates round to bask in its glory, we found we couldn't play multiplayer PGR3 without a memory card(to make an extra account - there was no guest option).

But anyway, PGR3. That motion blur. And the windscreen with little scratches reflecting the wonderfully realistic sunlight. And the controller vibration. Jesus wept.

I laughed at the PS3 for many years. It was a hot mess in comparison, and the BR drive was only thing going for it imo.

I bought a used Core which eventually RRoD'd, then I bought a new Elite console to replace it. I eventually replaced that with the rather lovely 360S 4GB model.

I had such good times on the 360 and, like others, it was my first foray into HD console gaming. It almost always had the best versions of multiplatform games. Plus, it had a wonderfully diverse catalogue of game genres and prices - from Geometry Wars to Gears of War.

My only real complaint was the DVD drive noise when playing games but then MS allowed installing them.

[Asura]

The 360 was a great machine in its midlife.

I bought mine in 2006, while in Japan, from a small indie in Gunma, and the experience of owning an Xbox there was unusual. Many of the kids at the school I taught at liked videogames, and when I said to them I had bought an Xbox 360, their reaction was one of surprise.

Over there, at the time, many people had a PS2, or a Wii. The DS was riding high and the PSP had seen a surge of sales due to the success of Monster Hunter Portable. However, the Xbox 360, though present at most places you could buy videogames, had a different reputation; my students immediately asked if I was a really "hardcore" gamer. The subsequent discussion made me realise that in their eyes, the 360 was like how we, in the UK in the 90s, perceived something like the PC Engine or the NeoGeo - people could own a Megadrive or a SNES and still mainly just play FIFA and perhaps one or two movie game spinoffs. If you met someone who owned a PCE or NeoGeo, you knew that person really loved their videogames.

The supply of games dried up quite fast; first my local Tsutaya pretty much gave up on the unit. Although I bought Halo 3 there, it rarely got anything but the biggest releases. There was a place in Akiba which imported US games, though I had to buy most stuff from Play-Asia.

The machine had a couple of evident flaws. Firstly there was the region-locking situation, where the games varied significantly in terms of being locked/not locked, and it wasn't always clear which games were region-free. Then, some games had multiple languages and some didn't, and some were a hybrid - for instance, in Halo 3, when the console is set to English, all of the instructions and cutscenes are in English, but all of the game's incidental dialogue is in Japanese. I got through the game (as "videogame spoken Japanese" is usually quite straightforward; "go here", "do this", "defend this" and so on) but much of the story is still a mystery to me... Maybe I like it more than most people for this reason? Also I loved Cortana's Japanese VA.

I actually bought Halo 3 at a midnight launch. There were hoardings, standees, posters... And I was the only person there. I didn't even reserve a copy, I just rocked up at 11:59 and bought one. At least in some respect Microsoft really did try to push the machine, to their credit.

These were small gripes though which didn't mar the overall experience. I found that I mainly played Dead or Alive 4, Chrome Hounds and Lost Planet, as these were busy on Xbox live with some Japanese and often what I believe were US armed forces personnel at various nearby bases. Also some Koreans.

When I moved, I sold the machine, and around that time, I had a bunch of games mags from the UK; EDGE, GamesTM and the like. One of them had a big double-page spread on Halo with an image of the Master Chief filling most of one page. I brought this into school and asked my gamer students "who is this character?". They honestly didn't know. They knew he was the Xbox mascot and was "some American thing" but that was it. They were fifteen and loved videogames; no matter the effort Microsoft had put in, it was evident they had failed.

I would later buy another unit, a UK one, and used it to play a slew of games such as Assassin's Creed and Mirror's Edge, which I loved. That being said, my biggest use of the machine would be Street Fighter IV, which was practically the only Xbox game I played for a long time (in its various iterations).

It also gave us the Mass Effect franchise, which was pretty incredible. In fact, ME3 was one of the last games I played.

I remember coming to sell it one day when I turned it on, and despite that I was paying for Live, the dash was full of ads for Lynx and Doritos, and I had to move several pages just to access the game I had in the disc drive. Successive iterations of the dash had gotten worse and worse, and that was the nadir. It was a saturday morning at about 9am; I had it packed up and across the desk in CEX within an hour.

So yeah, I really liked the 360, and have great memories of it, but those memories are somewhat tarnished by how it ended. It's a shame.

[Atticus]

PS3 wasn't so bad in its early days. It launched with the brilliant Ridge Racer 7 for starters. That game is still a sight to behold and a joy to play.

I had a lot of fun with Motorstorm and VF5 + a VSHG around the launch window too

[Team Andromeda]

I didn't think it was half as good as the OG XBox myself and liked the PS3 more (thought it was a better-made system too).

That said some highlights would be, seeing PGR 3 running in 720p on launch day was just amazing and showed the future of game displays. LIVE was just amazing and set the standards that all copied and followed. It was great to see the pop up when your mates loged in and what games they were playing. Also love how E3 was covered on the 360 and being able to watch it on the system and then moments latter being able to download the ER3 demo of Lost Planet was a true highlight.

Best games on the system for me was Ninja Gaiden II and Ninja Blade

[randombs]

I was never a fan of how much MS pushed the Xbox 360 in Japan. It just felt like a load of wasted money and effort that could've been spent on the Western gaming world where they were liked/loved.

I even remember them allocating a bunch of consoles for Japan when there were shortages in other countries.

Japanese developers were lining up to release games on it - it got Final Fantasy XIII, ffs - and I'm sure it was financially motivated rather than as thanks for MS's blood/sweat/tears spent in the Far East.

[Asura]

PS3 wasn't so bad in its early days. It launched with the brilliant Ridge Racer 7 for starters. That game is still a sight to behold and a joy to play.

I had a lot of fun with Motorstorm and VF5 + a VSHG around the launch window too

The PS3's launch was pretty bad though. It had some good games but it was so expensive. Sony were trying to recapture that magic success of the PS2/DVD by providing a way to upgrade to Blu-ray, but there just wasn't the immediate demand (I think HDTV uptake was slower than they were expecting). Then they had the problem of trying to do too much; the PS3 was originally going to be a wireless router in addition to its other features. There are other things too; the launch units had a memory-stick slot and could interface with Sony cameras... They had quite elaborate plans.

Personally I feel the PS3 hit its stride around the slim unit's release; the price came down and there were a bunch of exclusive games like Dark Souls and MAG that were fantastic.

[Digfox]

Dark Souls

Demon's Souls

[Brad]

Demon's Souls you mean?

I bought a PS3 over 360 on the basis of Motorstorm and RFOM (played at a mate's house) along with the impending MGS4.