13th December 2019, 7:45 PM
So, Microsoft showed off their upcoming console at the Game Awards recently. I didn't watch (because the Game Awards are more ofa long advert than a real awards show...) but I've seen the main announcement, this. And the new award for in the "potentially confusing console name" contest, last won by the Wii U, has a new challenger: Microsoft! Taking a book from the Apple school of device naming, the followup to the Xbox One is the... uh, Xbox Series? Seriously? Xbox Series X is the one they just announced, and it's probably the higher end of what will likely end up being two models. It's probably a good guess that the other one will be the Xbox Series S.
I guess the idea is that since they are getting away from distinct platforms and now are working on a more PC-like iterative approach where each new system is backwards compatible with the last, with some games that work on both consoles and others that only work on the new one, they are also going even farther away from having a clearly distinct name for the console that is easy to tell apart from other Xbox systems, but as someone who has always preferred numbers and such, so you actually can tell which one the system is, this move is kind of annoying.
Oh, and I hope they make the 'which games work on the Xbox One and which don't' thing really obvious, because otherwise it will be very confusing.
And I'm not even getting in to the other, surely intentional take on the name, the acronym. Xbox SX? The juvenile jokes write themselves. And come on, isn't this supposed to be a serious console?
The other news is that they also showed what is apparently going to be the shell for this console.... and it's huge! At 12" tall and 6" wide and deep, this is a very large system. You can also put it sideways, but 6" tall is still quite high for a modern system; the last system to need that kind of space is probably the Gamecube with its lid open. The space I currently have my Xbox One S in has 5 3/4" height, I measured. That shelf is adjustable down a bit so I probably could reorganize to make it fit, if I pretend that I was trying to fit that thing into this same space, but if it really is that height lots of people will have issues with the size, even sideways. The thing looks alright, in that modern, "flat" style (that I think looks alright I guess but will never be a big fan of), with a curved-in grille making it a bit more than JUST straight line edges. And yeah, it's powerful, and by making it big they probably help cool it down better. But this is a console, not a PC, space is a concern...
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/12/12/m...-series-x/
I guess the idea is that since they are getting away from distinct platforms and now are working on a more PC-like iterative approach where each new system is backwards compatible with the last, with some games that work on both consoles and others that only work on the new one, they are also going even farther away from having a clearly distinct name for the console that is easy to tell apart from other Xbox systems, but as someone who has always preferred numbers and such, so you actually can tell which one the system is, this move is kind of annoying.
Oh, and I hope they make the 'which games work on the Xbox One and which don't' thing really obvious, because otherwise it will be very confusing.
And I'm not even getting in to the other, surely intentional take on the name, the acronym. Xbox SX? The juvenile jokes write themselves. And come on, isn't this supposed to be a serious console?
The other news is that they also showed what is apparently going to be the shell for this console.... and it's huge! At 12" tall and 6" wide and deep, this is a very large system. You can also put it sideways, but 6" tall is still quite high for a modern system; the last system to need that kind of space is probably the Gamecube with its lid open. The space I currently have my Xbox One S in has 5 3/4" height, I measured. That shelf is adjustable down a bit so I probably could reorganize to make it fit, if I pretend that I was trying to fit that thing into this same space, but if it really is that height lots of people will have issues with the size, even sideways. The thing looks alright, in that modern, "flat" style (that I think looks alright I guess but will never be a big fan of), with a curved-in grille making it a bit more than JUST straight line edges. And yeah, it's powerful, and by making it big they probably help cool it down better. But this is a console, not a PC, space is a concern...
https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/12/12/m...-series-x/