I'm surprised that the cows haven't come to stampede this thread yet. SkullboyXwow your so funny.....not
dartdragoonpwn's forum posts
Looking at the hardware itself, Microsoft has done an ample job convincing a lot of gamers that the 360 Premium is worth $399, and nobody's really questioning it at this point in time. Even skeptical consumers like me tossed down the $399 required to go "premium" for an Xbox 360, and came away quite impressed. Most of us thought that what we were buying was the "best of the best" in terms of packages that were offered by Microsoft. Sure, maybe in the future, Microsoft would release an updated version of the premium system with a few extras here and there to entice new buyers, like a bigger hard drive and an HDMI port eventually. That was fair. That made sense.
This new version being fair for gamers is quite debatable at this point in time. We already know that it doesn't make sense. This new version is nothing more than necessary changes being price-gouged from those who would like these features. Black casing and accessories, a bigger hard drive, and the inclusion of an HDMI port and cable do not justify a $479 price tag. In fact, it doesn't really warrant a price increase. These inclusions probably cost Microsoft next to nothing to implement in their existing Xbox 360 Premium. Make no mistake - that is exactly what they did.
After trying to wrap my head around this for several weeks, off and on, I still cannot for the life of me understand why Microsoft decided it necessary to implement a third version of the Xbox 360 to add features that should have just been added to the existing 360 Premium. For a company that wants to be the leader in the game industry, Microsoft is doing absolutely everything it can to splinter their users and screw over practically everybody who becomes a customer. This mistake is just the latest in a very, very long series of blunders and poor decisions from Microsoft.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not picking on Microsoft for wanting to make money. Far from it, actually. Making a profit is the name of the game. Nobody wants to work for negative income. I think just about everyone can agree that this seems to be a bit of an extreme way to recoup losses, though. This is certainly not the way to do it.
Here's a question I'd like you to keep in mind as you read the rest of this article:
"Who is Microsoft trying to appeal to with the 360 Elite?"
Really, sit down and look at the 360 Elite and all of the other projects they're doing. See if you can figure it out.
Microsoft has made it very clear that they'd like to rip you off earn your money from content on Xbox Live Marketplace via a subscription that most pay for on top of this content. So to that end, a 14GB 20GB hard drive isn't nearly enough space to make that a convenient task for its users. When you start downloading high-definition stuff, 20GB starts getting very laughable, very fast. An easy solution here is to offer a larger capacity hard drive for sale for as low a price as you possibly can, and to introduce that same drive in all of the new 360 Premium editions you sell. After all, they'd like as many people as possible to get in on this whole downloadable content thing. One would think that's the real reason they included a hard drive with the 360 Premium in the first place. While they're at it, they might as well add an HDMI port for people with fairly new HDTVs to enjoy that high-definition content that they'd like consumers to buy on the Marketplace.
You know what one thing that gets me going more than anything is when Xbox 360 players say that Halo 3 is the best first-person shooter ever made. I have to say you guys are crazy first off, you have to be completely ignorant of the very history of the first-person shooter. Just because it was made for an Xbox does not make it the best first-person shooter ever. So I'm going to teach you guys a little bit on why Halo 3 sucks, how it's not an original game, and how there isn't anything special about Halo 3. It's just a carbon copy of the normal first-person shooter games. So first off, just to show you exactly how ignorant you are, let's start at the beginning,
Roots
The very first, really big first-person shooter was Wolfenstein 3D. If you want to talk about groundbreaking then Wolfenstein 3D was definitely the most groundbreaking of the first-person shooters. It is literally in the grandpa of the first-person shooter genre, what's Awesome is the fact that IDSoft couldn't leave this stuff alone, so the very following year they brought out Doom.
These two are the games that literally the entire industry is now built upon. Without these key games the industry would have gone nowhere, but we also wouldn't have to put up with the cheap imitations like Halo 3.
True 3-D
Now, if you think about it, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom really weren't 3D games. The next really big game that was released, also by IDSoft, was Duke Nukem 3D. Again not really a 3D game, it used a lot of 2D tricks to give it the appearance of being a 3D game, but we really didn't get a true 3D game until Quake came along.
This was way beyond what we had ever experienced before and it was so cool! Quake was built off of polygon graphics, not 2D sprites. You could literally look at all sides of an enemy. The other beautiful thing about Quake is that IDSoft actually encouraged user made modifications, where a user could come in at any given point in time and change how the game reacted, or add new maps.(I don't see Halo 3 being able to do that!)
Now I know you're probably thinking that it was a first when it came to console games. Again that's just not true.
If we want to talk about a console game that truly broke ground in the genre, as far as the first-person shooter is concerned, you better start looking towards Nintendo and for a game called Goldeneye 007. Sure is a game that truly gives you the multiplayer ability that the consoles have, but again the PC has always had better first-person shooters.
In 1998 Sierra released, what in my opinion, was the best first-person shooter at the time. It was definitely groundbreaking, and they made a truly spectacular game. That title was called Half Life. If you want to talk about where Halo 3 has gotten all of its ideas! In Half-Life, one of the creatures is called head crabs, which coincidently looks almost exactly like what the flood looks like in Halo. Copy Cats! They couldn't even come up with an original design!
If you don't believe me just go pick up the High-Resolution pack of Half-Life. You will see that this is a game that has been around long, long before Halo ever thought of being made. And almost all of the ideas that Bungee got for their game came almost directly from Half-Life. Almost all of the content of Halo has was ripped almost completely out of Half-Life.
People talk about how in Halo you have the ability to drive vehicles. Well that sort of stuff has been around for ages too, Unreal Tournament 2004 had vehicles. They also had capture the flag and better yet assault game modes.
Conclusion
Just saying in conclusion, Halo fan boys, do not bother to claim your sub-par game is the best game in the world, it just shows how truly ignorant you are. The story, the graphics and the game play are absolutely nothing new. So before you start getting on my case about what I've said, I hope that you do your homework, and don't come to with me with irrational claims. The simple fact is that Halo doesn't do anything new and doesn't advance the genre at all.
Halo would be nothing without its predecessors, and proper respect should be paid to them. So all you Fan boys out there, do your home work, and realize that Halo is not the end all, be all, of first-person shooters. There are many, much better games out there.
Don't believe me? Go play Half-Life 2 because that is a game that is truly amazing and is really pushing the limits . One that has earned more than 40 Game of the Year Awards, and is a true groundbreaker and a leader in the industry.
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