360 one of Endgadget's "10 gadgets that defined the decade"
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Just for online play where only minority subscribed to ? What happened to the larger gaming population ?
EDIT:
For gadgets that defines the decade, I would scout for things that define our times:
[size=-2]So we know we are in deep sh*t[/size]
* Surviving inventions from the dot-com boom and bust
* Small weapons for our middle-east war and espionage (like the unmanned plane that made the news recently)
* Technologies that help to detect financial frauds
* Border security stuff
* Worldwide influential devices (perhaps, that still keeps Americans employed)
* Import products that no American companies can beat
* Some forward looking tech (Green energy, non-GEO food [size=-2]that promise to keep Americans alive and employed[/size])
I am actually curious about MS Sync.
It's 2 games he happened to mentioned in condensed text. Would it make you feel better if the dumped his entire library of played 360 games on there? Email the editor for his gamertag. Then tell us if he's played more than 2 games.
Then his condensed text needs to be changed to gain more credibility (Helping you to explain why the comments section blew up). I personally don't care what his/their choices are.
No it does not. So putting CoD and Gears in this whole text:
"You don't remember a console for the chips inside or the case design, but the games you played. For me those games were Gears of War and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I bought the 360 in 2006, and always felt a little out of step with what my friends were playing -- particularly as the catalog has ballooned in 2008 and 2009. But these two games forged the perfect intersection with my Xbox Live friends list. I spent untold hours hopping from match to match with a group of peers, shouting cries of despair into my wired headset as I continually fulfilled my role as "the weakest link" on my team. Those two games were everything I'd ever tried to emulate growing up with a game of laser tag, a pair of walkie talkies or an elaborately constructed Lego battlefield, and I got to share them in real time with real people thanks to technologies so complicated and market forces so beyond me that I'd really prefer not to even think about them. - Paul Miller"
Is what prompted the blow up? What would have been better? Halo and Rainbow Six? GRAW and Trails HD? it doesn't matter what he wrote. The blow up happened because he picked the 360.
Those games he listed or many other he could have listed simply brought him close to Live which is the main reason he picked the 360.
Trying to salvage this thread...
Rather than saying why it's a bad choice over and over again, why don't you tell me which console you would have chosen, and exactly why it was influential in defining the decade? If you're after a format for why you believe it, possibly look at my first response in this thread, with details around the key features/changes your choice added to the landscape of gaming.
Some tips if you missed them above: sales are not the metric here, as was stated in his PS2 mention.
The 360 easily deserves it, not because of games mind you. Games this gen are great and all, but they are mostly extensions of last gens games. It's because of XBLive. The social aspects of it, the completeness, convenience and consistency of the service, it's huge feature set combined with having a headset in every box made Live a must have service this decade that is still without equal, and hence make the 360 a must have gadget. Remember that XBLive is far better in the USA according to peoples descriptions on this very forum who claim live to be gimped in Europe, etc, so for the USA the 360 is an easy to pick must have gadget.
Just explaining what I thought Patsu was saying, in reply to RobertR1's objection. I don't really care which is picked either
I dunno. I think there's a very strong case to be made for the PS2 in that it garnered a huge userbase worldwide, but it was essentially a simple gameplaying box and nothing more. I don't want to sound like I'm disregarding the huge achievement of Sony in getting that machine to market and effectively making it the killer console to own, as I'm not. However, the reality is that the PS2 was an incremental evolution of the PS1, which in itself was an incremental evolution of the SNES, prior to that being the NES (and a whole host of "me too" machines during that time). Each evolution saw a faster processor, better graphics, better sound, more buttons on the controller. Yes, the PS2 had a DVD player built in, but other that that, it was just a more powerful PS1.
The 360 brought online to the masses. Yes, PC gamers had been playing online for an age, but it was still then (and is still now in many cases) a complicated, disconnected affair. With Live, day one we had a controlled, singular environment where people could easily meet up and game together. Also, as most machines (except the Core) came with a Microphone in the box, MS stated clearly their intent.
Included in that is the Gamerscore, a move of pure genius. People buying/renting games just for the gamerpoints. People playing online together to boost their gamerscores. Gamercards being added into sigs on forums everywhere. And it benefits gamers, as they will often put more hours into their $60 purchase as they know achieving a certain goal, which is maybe off the beaten path, will give them 30 gamerpoints.
And all of this was available out of the box, day 1. Along with being able to stream media from your PC, being able to use your own custom music in any and all games (either saved locally or streamed from a PC), being able to send either text or voice messages, being able to "rate" other players, the ability to set randoms you met on a server as either a player you would like to meet again or one to avoid in future, saving a list of the last hundred or so gamers you met online so you could easily add them as a friend after meeting them in a couple of games and getting along with them. Filing player complaints. It goes on and on.
Ah, and the Friends list itself.
And day one we had the Arcade marketplace. Small, cheap titles that allow a few hours of gaming for a relatively small outlay, with every one having a demo to allow you to try before you buy. Every single one. And as much as some may dislike the MS Points system, it means you don't need a credit card to get involved, as you can buy from online and high street retailers.
Which leads on to DLC. Mission packs have long been a staple of PC gaming, but the 360 was the first time that it became focused, with a centralised system that allowed you to search for updates for any 360 game you had bought. Sure, some DLC is rubbish, but that's not the fault of MS, just as MS can't claim the credit when a piece of DLC is outstanding (unless they publish it, that is
) In the old days, you played a game and traded it. Now, if it's a game you like, the life can be extended with good quality DLC.And then later on adding features such as the video store. Yes, it's still spotty on a country by country basis, but they beat the company that owns huge film and media companies by more than a year. Latterly, we have services such as Netflix and SkyPlayer (which is far better than I expected, btw), as well as further expansion of the social aspects of Live, such as Parties for gaming or even stupid stuff as being able to watch the same film as friends on your list, a press of a button showing your avatars watching a big screen. Or how about 1 vs 100? Again, nothing like that had ever been done before
After a few years on the market, MS completely redesigned their GUI, bringing into play a slicker system, a faster way of browsing and the much derided Avatars which, ironically enough, are now getting some love in a wide range of games.
So while the PS2 was (and is) a great gaming machine that sold millions, the base concept of the machine can be pretty much charted in an evolutionary line from the success of the Atari 2600. Essentially a core gaming machine for the solitary gamer, and occasionally used for a game of football with a couple of friends.
And the Wii? Well, a huge change in the way we can interface with a console, bringing in a much wider demographic. But other than the waggle, it is essentially an evolution of all that went before and, again, is essentially a solitary or living room experience.
But the 360, with the Live service it refined from the original Xbox, revolutionised console gaming, making it a worldwide affair. Friends, game invites, cross game chat, cross game messaging, gamerscore, ability to see what friends are playing, etc. and all in a single, simple to use environment.
It all seems so normal now. But that's what is so amazing about the achievement, and why I believe it's entirely fair for someone who vote it "best of the decade". Microsoft had a vision about what the 360 was there for, started with a strong hand and has just improved on it since then.
And before semitope, E2K or one of the other Playtards says it, yes RROD has been a huge fuck-up. But that doesn't distill the revolution that MS has led in how consoles will connect to the world in the future.
My longest B3D post, methinks
I don't think you can say this, not when the runners-up by far outsold the 360. The Wii's much more credible as a 'must-have gadget'. For its first year and a half you could barely find it in stores. If you want to go technologically, then sure, there's a much stronger argument there. I don't find it particularly convincing because in that way, I think the original xbox (with Halo 2) was much more influential.
That's all supposing that consoles exist in a vacuum. For one, the original xbox did a lot of that stuff. NG for xbox had the hurricane pack, for instance. It wasn't paid, but it was extra content added only via download (and later re-released on disc, of course). But even that is being a bit naive -- all that infrastructure always existed on the PC. You can't act as if MS invented a community on the 360 when really they co-opted a lot of the ideas from PC gaming with the original xbox and expanded on them with the 360.
Also, 'Playtards'? Is this a race to the bottom?
ShadowRunner
Veteran
Xbox live as a platform should have been his choice rather than the 360, it started out on the original Xbox afterall and evolved from there rather than it being something totaly new and groundbreaking brought in by 360. Then again that wouldnt really be a gadget.
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Sure, I buy this.
Actually, you hit the nail on the head there. That's exactly what MS did, they invented an Xbox360 community.
On the PC, there may have been an Everquest community and a CounterStrike community and a Quake community and a Need for Speed community, but there has never been a PC community.
You're playing Quake 3 and want to get a friend along? You don't know if he's online or not, and if he is then what he's playing. So you either quit out and open up ICQ to see if he's logged in. And if not, is that because he's using another messaging program at the time? Or is he playing Unreal Tournament? And if ICQ is up and running and you send him a message, is the reason he's not responding because he's out, having a shit or playing UT?
Which is why gaming was organised on the phone, or prearranged on forums.
So yes, MS co-opted some ideas from what already existed, but just made everything easier and more complete. Adding into that universal chat, the requirement for gamerscore, invites (rather than typing out IP addresses
), etc. you do have a revolution, a revolution that took online gaming from the bedroom to the living room.As for a later post that ShadowRunner made about Live over 360, it's the fact that the two were devoloped hand in hand. Day one you could push that big X button in the middle of a game to bring up all of the communication/organisation functions. It's not just a pause menu, but a key feature that integrates you as a player with the service that is Live.
Sure, but there were tools before this. IRC, message boards and even xfire was in wide use before the 360 showed up. Trying to pretend that PC gaming was in a dark ages of beating drums and sending smoke signals is plain-out wrong. If you want to credit MS, then credit them for the original xbox, which is where most of this integration started. Or credit them for Live. The 360 was a consolidation of what they had already been doing.
It's an evolutionary step -- again, console gaming doesn't exist in a vacuum.
Except that a good portion of the functionality existed before the 360, in MS' first console. Otherwise, gaming was already online for western developers (and had been a main focus since, what, 1999?). It was just on a different platform.
ShadowRunner
Veteran
It was still an evolution though. Forget the decade worth of gadgets, even just looking at the current generation alone i would find it hard to see anyhing other than the Wii having the biggest impact. Without the wii motion control would still be nowhere, instead we now have the other 2 consoles getting in on the action. If 360 didnt exist we would still have pretty much the basics of what live provides today anyway, 360 or not.
Pretty much. We may not have had achievements, but if everyone else just grew on what the original Xbox offered we'd at least have some sort of xfire-like chat interface built-in.
I wholeheartedly agree on every point. If anything, I'd give a nod to the original Xbox over the 360 since it was the first to utilize standard HDD's, offer BB gaming out of the box (XBL roots, which looked suspiciously similar to XBAND), and the often forgotten true discrete 5.1 audio.
Neither the 360 or the PS3 have done anything special to stand out IMO. I don't consider achievements or trophies anything special.. just seem like features tailor made for people who love wasting all of their time and suck whatever fun they have with gaming.
Seems that the editor is crediting MS a lot for online play when it's something that migrated from PC and they weren't even the first offer it in the console field.
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So does anyone not expect the next gen of consoles to have the features that Live/PSN employs?
Honestly, how many of today's gamers would now buy a system that doesn't have on-line MP, video streaming, dlc, etc as the norm.
Almost all of the features that the 360/Live has implemented should be considered standard for a next gen system IMO. In that way, I think you can say that MS has changed the face of gaming and is deserving of the award.
Honestly, how many of today's gamers would now buy a system that doesn't have on-line MP, video streaming, dlc, etc as the norm.
Almost all of the features that the 360/Live has implemented should be considered standard for a next gen system IMO. In that way, I think you can say that MS has changed the face of gaming and is deserving of the award.
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