DANIEL WONG/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Michael
Leon (left) and Raymond Cano battle it
out while playing "NFL Fever" on the X-Box game system.
By Robert Esposito
Daily Bruin Contributor
It took balls for Microsoft to release its first-ever video game
console this year amidst competition from veteran heavyweights Sony
and Nintendo.
“X-Box Unleashed” is what Microsoft is calling part
one of its $500 million advertising campaign for the new X-Box
console ““ to be released Nov. 15 ““ which took form this
weekend as a bicoastal spectacle in New York and Los Angeles.
The West Coast scene took place at Universal City Walk in Los
Angeles, where packs of gamers lined up as early as 7:30 a.m. on
Thursday to play games on the new console and compete in a 48-hour
gaming marathon sponsored by Ford, Taco Bell and SoBe, among
others.
The event kicked off Friday, Nov. 2 at 12:01 a.m. with
KROQ-hosted performances from Sugar Ray’s DJ Hurricane, C
Minus of Korn and Lethal from Limp Bizkit. The salient feature of
the event was the giant competition cube, a slightly opaque
Plexiglass structure that housed an announcer, the competitors and
officials dressed in black shirts adorned with alien-green
X’s to match the X-Box’s own aesthetic scheme. Inside
this cube were crammed contenders, rife with the energy of fierce
competition.
 DANIEL WONG/Daily Bruin Senior Staff The X-Box
competition cube, made mostly of plexiglass, fills the plaza in
front of the Hard Rock Cafe at Universal City Walk.
First-, second- and third-place players were awarded a
customized Ford Explorer Sport Trac, a trip to Baja California and
a year of free Taco Bell and SoBe energy drinks, respectively. Of
course, all prizes included X-Boxes and the full lineup of launch
games.
For noncompetitive action, Microsoft set up a free gaming area
replete with food and drink, free T-shirts and goodies, and an army
of women dressed as characters from the X-Box fighting game
“Dead or Alive 3.”
Behind all of the hype and spectacle is a 13.2-inch wide,
10.8-inch deep, 3.54-inch tall piece of hardware that not only
gives gamers what they want, but gives developers the ability to
give it to them.
Seamus Blackley, X-Box technology officer and concept founder,
had a vision of empowering the people who make games.
 DANIEL WONG/Daily Bruin Senior Staff Aaron
Zuber focuses on the game "Mad Dash" at the X-Box
competition Saturday.
“We wanted a vehicle that would take gaming into the main
stream, arming game developers with the weapons of
film.”
After literally thousands of hours of research, including
opinion polls and meetings with developers, Blackley and his elite
team began to compile what they hoped to be the ultimate
system.
“Traditional console peripherals only attract five to
seven percent of the installed user base. We are including our hard
drive and ethernet support in the box to make the games for it
available to everybody,” Blackley said.
The 8-GB hard drive will allow faster load times, huge game
saves, and a technique called dual spooling to alleviate precious
RAM. Dual spooling will allow advantages such as seven to eight
hours of uninterrupted gameplay or hundreds of unique comments from
announcers in sports games.
Additional features unique to X-Box is the use of a 733 MHz
Intel processor and a custom NVIDIA graphics chip, both which have
a wealth of development tools already available due to their use in
PCs. The combination of familiar programming architecture and the
luxury of a hard drive will allow developers to make levels as
large and detailed as they want and comments as verbose and varied
as the voice actors are willing to record.
The console also boasts its four game controller ports,
front-loading DVD tray, and its audio-video connector that allows
connection to televisions and home theater systems.
Yet Blackely decided to make creativity, rather than the
technical specifications of the X-Box, his primary focus.
“People confuse technology for creativity,” said
Blackley. “We will differentiate ourselves with our
games.”
X-Box will launch with 15-20 games including “Halo,”
“Dead or Alive 3,” and “Tony Hawk’s Pro
Skater 2X.”
Gamers at the event had mostly positive opinions of the system
and its current game line-up. Every console has to have a
“killer app” upon release to attract gamers, and X-Box
is no exception.
“”˜Halo’ is going to be the best game. I
definitely want an X-Box,” said Brady O’Connell,
marathon competitor and first-year student at Cal Poly San Luis
Obispo.
Blackley mentioned the X-Box’s ability to reach
college-aged gamers, such as the competitors at the event.
Microsoft’s killer app for the system, “Halo,” a
game with a first person shooter, is so graphic that it could not
be included in the competition.
“”˜Halo’ really fucks with you ““ it
starts to scare you when you’ve been enveloped in this world
for hours with seamless action,” Blackley said.
Microsoft shows some clear signs of thought in its design and
execution of the X-Box. And Microsoft one-ups Sony’s force
feedback and pressure sensitive buttons with nine-foot cords that
break away from the system without pulling it off the shelf if the
controller is accidentally yanked.
“We also included two expansion ports in the controller so
you don’t have to get off your ass to change memory
cards,” Blackley said.
So should gamers give their $299 to Microsoft for this system?
Bill Gates and Seamus Blackley are willing to loose $100 dollars
for every system they sell if players decide to make the
plunge.
“I’ve had (an X-Box) on pre-order for weeks,”
O’Connell said.
Promising the best games, revolutionary hardware, and having
truly done its homework, Microsoft challenged consumers at the
event that X-Box will be yet another one of its success
stories.