I believe Japan will welcome 360s as liberators.
Actually, my problem is I don’t think Bush’s plan was the plan that was given to us, because I can’t imagine someone so mindbogglingly stupid as to really believe Bush’s plan had any chance of being realistic. The MS plan at least can follow logical conclusions, even if the presmises were faulty.
But you’re right in that since something along the chain borked them both up, there’s no way to know if the plan was reasonable or not. So I have to fall back on extrapolation: What could bush have done differently about kicking Sadam’s butt to make the people in Iraq worship us as they were supposed to and feverishly rebuild the damage we’d caused without inviting substantial insurrection and resentment? Conversely, what could MS have done differently to make their 360 launch plan work?
(As long as we’re talking hypotheticals, I think it’s fair to say that another 3M units at launch would’ve made the 360 launch a blockbuster. Possibly less. I can’t think of anything, no matter how unrealistic, that would’ve made Iraq work. Hence, I believe in the original MS launch plan, but not in the original Iraq war plan.)
Well, I don’t think the war was the right call , so in Xbox360 terms that would be…not launching at all? Hmm…that doesn’t sound right.
As for the 360, I think don’t think MS messed up by launching in the US in Nov, but the Japan launch was clearly the wrong call. They probably should’ve delayed the Japan launch till the end of Jan so that more games would’ve been ready for the Japan launch (Kameo, CoD2, Condemned are still TBA and PGR 3/ enchanted aRms was just released today). The 200k units that were shipped to Japan, while not huge, probably would’ve been enough to sate most of the Day-1 demand.
Fuck Best Buy.
Oh Oh, can I guess? NOTHING.
Can you assholes take the OMG BUSH SUX stuff back to P&R please?
I’ve heard the “wait till the bugs are worked out” line from people at three different department stores, too. So either there are problems with the hardware or a lot of people believe that there are problems. Either way, this doesn’t help MS.
I haven’t seen a real live 360 on a store shelf since about a week before Xmas. So I don’t think the supply issues are close to being resolved yet. Maybe it’ll be March, like some are saying. Though how many people were also claiming that huge shipments were on the way the first week of January? I don’t know why anyone cares now, though. The initial hype is long gone and only the most rabid Xbox fanboy would view buying a 360 as a worthwhile investment, given the fact that the best games available for it are Robotron and Gauntlet.
Don’t forget Joust!
-Tom
I’d be the first guy to agree with this if it were true, but it’s not.
Project Gotham Racing 3 is definitely worth owning the system for, as is Call of Duty 2 for all the people that have no PC to run it on (a huge swath of the console buying public).
It’s clear that being on Live is paramount to enjoying the system to its fullest. If you’re not going to get a Live Gold account and participate in the community there, the 360 will not wow you. However, for competitive gamers like me, the Gamerscore and the in-game High Score tables are driving me to play my games with a lot more investment in my own skills. I’m also chatting with people on Live a lot more over high scores and better ways of playing my games. That’s pretty great.
There are definite bugs. I made a post at Gaming Age today about the problems with pushing the Guide button at the wrong time. It WILL lock up your 360 if you don’t wait for it to populate the screens with data and rush to push buttons. This seems to happen in every game under certain circumstances so I think it’s something in the Dashboard OS itself. Dead or Alive 4 is probably the one game that causes it the most. There also seems to be some issues with the way games are handling profiles and having to have multiple profiles for multiplayer in some (all?) games is just plain crazy. There are also bugs in the games, and I like those even less than the avoidable Guide Button glitches.
But despite all that, this thing is worth getting for gamers. You’re going to enjoy a lot of stuff about the hardware and some of the games are certainly worth playing. There are a lot of great decisions in the hardware and the software that runs it. The big dumb stuff is the availability of the Retard Pack which makes games not able to rely on the hard drive (PGR3 would not have those load times if they were using the HDD) and the fact they can’t make enough systems fast enough to satisfy the demand they created. I still think they should’ve either sold it for more money or just waited to release it until Easter-time or something.
So, I’m not a rabid Xbox fanboy, but I think this was a worthwhile investment. PGR3, Geometry Wars, Call of Duty 2, Dead or Alive 4, Joust, etc. have all entertained me for a tens of hours already. The high score tables and Gamerscore Achievements have only made that all the more awesome. I’m glad I got in on the ground floor.
Speaking of PGR3, I came across this today and thought it was pretty cool
PGR3 Screenshots vs Reallife
http://www.xbox360-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=593
Xbox Live is definately the killer app for 360 right now.
I’ve posted this before but… The morning after reading, and implementing the small notification app (Urly Warning) in this blog article, I managed to snag a Premium 360 from Circuit City. It works, and there’s no catch, no software to buy, etc. If you want a 360 before March, just take the 5 minutes required to set it up.
I bought my 360 after I aimlessly wandered into a Virgin Megastore and they happened to have 2 premiums left. This was a week ago today.
Not true, they just haven’t been looking at the right time. I just missed several Premium non bundlefucked systems from places like Fingerhut.
If it’s anything like the catalog, shipping would be a killer from Fingerhut. It was still overpriced: $600 for the 360, a game and the plug and play kit.
Wal-Mart and Dell have it in stock now. That said, I should revise my statement to the vast majority of offers being from Amazon.com.
Bundlefucks don’t count.
I’m not sure you’ll find any. Even Fingerhut is a bundle and $100 overpriced.
Just remember you can buy a bundle from almost any brick and mortar store’s website then return the bits you don’t want. I know myself and others did this with Circuit City and it worked out great.
– Xaroc
I just want to walk into a store and walk out with a system. I’ve got the money right here.