Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2013/11/19/xboxone.html
Rob Beschizza takes Microsoft’s new console for a spin. It’s good enough, but there aren’t enough good games and apps yet.
Setup went without a hitch, but the voice recognition doesn’t seem to work very well. Another thing to file under “yet”, perhaps?
Could that be an accent thing? I’ve found my phone’s speech to text to be quite good at picking up my Canadian mumbling, but I see Brits complain about voice recognition a lot.
I added some more thoughts on this. It seemed to understand me very well – I just wasn’t using the right words. It’s weird. You have to say the exact right things, and it can’t figure out slight variations that would make sense to, say, Siri.
For example, “Xbox Stop Listening” is how you stop it listening to voice commands. NOTHING ELSE WILL STOP IT that I could figure out. Xbox OK? Xbox stop? Xbox Shush?. Something other than “Xbox Stop Listening”, please!
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So it’ll pick up on you saying “Xbox, shut the hell up!” but doesn’t have any commands associated with that. Gotcha.
[Wii U-related fanboy comment]
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$500, or even $400 is too much for this generation of consoles since they’re pretty much evolutionary on a small scale. I’m sure both consoles have lots of minor “nice to have” new features but so far they’re maybe in the $200 value range. I’m sure they’re much more valuable to others and they’ll sell well. But if they want to pull me in, something completely different is going to have to invented for the consoles.
Perhaps something like in the case of the Kinect 2 on the Xbox which appears to have increased in resolution by an order of magnitude, use it to scan my body which would let a tailor be able to ship me custom made clothes without needing me to step foot in their shop. Or a line of health monitoring devices that work with the advanced capabilities of a console to seamlessly transmit daily updates in HealthVault or other record keeping service.
There has got to be SOMETHING interesting and new other than slightly nicer graphics and a few more video sources to make nearly half a grand worth it.
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I still haven’t seen a convincing reason why anyone would spend more money on an xbox one over just buying the superior PS4. Unless you really like being watched, I guess.
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Every other article is saying the same thing concerning Xbox or PS4 launch games. These articles have become so ubiquitous BuzzFeed even has an article lamenting the lack of games in the lineup. Launch lineup be damned. Battlefield 4 multiplayer on PS4 is plenty to last me until something new comes along.
The old console hardware is 8 years long in the tooth now. The PS4 version of BF4 offers twice the pixels, twice the frame rate and twice the player count of previous console versions. Therefore I’d rather buy the $60 game for the new consoles than buy it for the old. While I get that some gamer’s aren’t interested in shooters like BF4, sales figures show that most are.
I already have a HTPC so most of Microsoft’s media gimmicks are inferior or redundant. Most of XBoxOne’s media capabilities can be one upped by a $70 Roku. What’s the point?
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Well, here’s the thing, Rob. Remember all the stink over things such as the Kinect “needing” to always be on and the XBone itself “needing” to always be connected to the internet, or at least once a day? And then after people pretty much said that, between that and the $100 premium over the PS4, they wouldn’t be getting one, and all of a sudden Microsoft declares that, hey, they changed their minds about that stuff, never mind? That implied that all those “gottas” that were supposedly built into the system were, in fact, toggleable. Which means that they could potentially be toggled back. And combined with the recent thing about LG Smart TVs reporting back on what people watch, and LG’s response basically being hey, you clicked through the EULA so fuck you, it all makes me think that MS could try sneaking some of these things back into a “system upgrade.”
tl;dr–I still don’t trust the fuckers. The only thing I’d mainly want it for is Blu-Ray, and since it won’t play 360 games, I may as well get a PS3 when they start getting price-slashed, because that also lets me play The Last of Us.
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8/10 is an awfully good score for a review that expressed a lot of negativity over the system.
if it’s as clunky and hard to control as the article makes it out to seem, then perhaps a tentative 6/10 until a more thorough review can be done later on would be appropriate.
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Gaming products are rated on the 7-9 scale. It’s our official scale.
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just use the money to upgrade your PC this year, it’s clearly this generation’s best console.
Some of us use both. It isn’t necessarily an either/or situation. I play plenty of games on the PC but I like playing from the easy chair and detest keyboard/mouse for playing games. Sure it’s more accurate but for me it’s highly uncomfortable. If you want to be competitive playing with a controller it helps to play against others using a controller. This is where the console come in .
I wish Steam games had more controller support.If their games had auto-correct for aiming with a controller on PC games I would not feel the need to buy a console at all.
And even then it can read your lips.
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you do know that either console’s controller works perfectly well on PC and with most if not all PC games, especially shooters and indie.
A lot of casual gamers like to just plop down on a couch in front of a big TV and play side-by-side with friends or family. There aren’t that many PC games which fit that bill even if you’re inclined to do the set up.
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I pretty much only use a 360 controller while playing games on my PC. If I play shooters on Steam servers against players using keyboard/mouse and the game does not support auto-correct aiming on controllers as do console games I get spanked hard. Anyone would. Most or maybe all of these PC games that support controllers do not auto-correct aiming.
So, yeah, you can play online multiplayer on a PC with a controller as long as you don’t mind coming in dead last match after grueling match! Not my idea of a good time. YMMV
Just to share my 2¢:
I will NEVER let Microsoft, or any other American company, have eyes and ears into my living room.
Maybe, if some day I have a room just for playing video games, I might consider it - If I could Faraday the room. Maybe. But in light of the spying TV and complete lack of regard for privacy that seems epidemic these days, I think Sony (oh I hate Sony, with their proprietary cables and card formats), but they might be the only decent option for next gen consoles. Not that I’m finished with my old 360.
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My wife complains there aren’t games to play together. In the same living room. I can play with my brother across the country, but not my wife who’s sitting beside me.
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You can. Just make sure you throw a blanket over the Kinect first.
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