Now I need to find a job so I can afford a computer to play the damn thing.
Or you could just but an Xbox and the game for 200 total, upon its release a few months later. It will also have an exclusive online co-op mode.
And Nukem will be released third quarter 1999.
I’ll believe it when I hold it in my hot little hands.
Check that–I’ll believe it a month later when I’ve finally downloaded and installed all the patches and bugfixes.
I have been vaccilating about buying an Xbox for a while. That news may have forced my hand if not for the recent report that the Xbox2 will not play original Xbox games. Considering that the Xbox2’s release date has been moved up (supposedly), buying into the current console in August would be tough for me to rationalize. Too bad, the old style co-op experience is something I really miss; the Serious Sam games were the only recent PC titles which came close.
Godless heathen. Doom III must be played with a keyboard and mouse. Thus spake the gaming gods. So let it be written, so let it be done.
Haha, fair enough. I’m a controller boy myself, never could quite get into the mouse and keyboard thing for first person shooters. But if that’s a deal-breaker, I can’t fault you for it.
A valid point. But the Xbox will be outdated no sooner than the current PC you’re utilizing. Of course, if you’d only be purchasing Xbox for this one game, than I can most certainly understand your hesitation.
Actually the rumors about what the XBox Next (yet to be named) will and won’t do are all strictly rum,ors. There are a lot of theories about types of storage, what features it will have and backward compatibility. But at this point, no one ousdie of that tight little group in Redmond knows. So I wouldn;t base your decsion solely on that.
Wow, hard to believe it wouldn’t be backwards compatible. I mean it’s just a closed box PC. Hard to believe Microsoft is gonna build a new one that wouldn’t be a wintel machine.
Other rumors are that the Xbox-whateverthefuckit’llbe will be powerful enough to emulate the original Xbox.
The next 'Box will be using an IBM processor - essentially the same thing that goes into a Mac, the polar opposite of an Intel chip - and will feature a graphics chip from ATI rather than nVidia.
I’m sure they’ll figure out a way to do it. Supposedly (yay for even MORE rumors!) Microsoft’s got a division trying to get an emulation up and running.
I get your point, though I think the fact that NVIDIA is out of the current project may be key here. If they choose to assert their intellectual property over the current graphics system (and there is no reason to assume they will not), the costs of emulation rights for the Xbox2 may be prohibitive. MS most likely plans to sell the new hardware at a marginal loss already, certainly they will look to cut expenses where possible. Obviously this is mere speculation, but it seems reasonable to me.
Releasing a next-generation console that’s not backwards compatible with the last generation of the same console would have to be a business error on the scale of New Coke. And say what you like about MicroSoft, they are very savvy when it comes to business.
Now, if it were Nintendo you were talking about, I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. I love my GameCube, but the number of unbelievably bone-headed design errors that went into that little box is absolutely staggering.
The Xbox II will have some variant of IBM’s Power4 core in it, kinda like the Mac G5’s PPC970 chip. In fact, development on XboxII games is being done now on dual-processor Macintosh G5’s.
Microsoft now owns VirtualPC, which reportedly will soon support the G5, as well as make use of multiple processors to emulate multithreading. VPC will also be able to provide native support for graphics cards, so no more software emulation. The chips likely to ship with the XboxII should be able to use something like VPC to emulate the 700MHz PIII in the Xbox quite handily. The problem is NVidia’s custom GPU they made just for the Xbox which would have to be emulated somehow for the ATI unit that will power the XboxII’s graphics. This may be impossible, for technical and IP reasons. Hence, playable emulation of the Xbox on the XboxII may prove to be impossible. I think the report cited above looks pretty plausible, and I’ve seen all of these issues discussed before.