X-Box One Pulls a 360!

With the Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) now over and the dust settling Microsoft has taken a step back from their DRM gaming stance and has made it more user friendly.

July tenth Microsoft announced the latest X-Box, the X-Box one and from the get go, had mixed reviews. When the X-Box One (XB1) was announced there was a heavy focus on the features and new functions of the system with it's new voice commands, gestures, and Kinect 2.0 but what had everyone talking was how it would play games.

The XB1 was originally announced that all games would no longer be disk based and would be saved to the HDD or the Cloud and would require you to have a constant connection to the internet to verify your disk copy. Your copy would be verified once every 24 hours on your own home console or once every hour on a friends console if you were playing games elsewhere.

This enables a really neat feature like up to 10 "family" members having access to play your games, even one with you at the same time. The downfall was an extremely restricted  "giving" policy and made borrowing games and renting impossible. (Microsoft did say that they would work on a way for renting and borrowing games but it would not be available at launch.

Microsoft took so much heat over it's DRM policy even Sony was throwing the low blows.



By the time E3 came around nothing new had changed and it seemed like Microsoft was standing firm and publicly announced that the newly designed X-Box 360 would be the consumer's choice for a non connected customer.

Fast forward to today, Microsoft has officially announced that due to consumer feedback, DRM would no longer be a staple of the system and that games can now be either installed to the HDD and Cloud or can now be played directly from the disk and that an internet connection would only be required at the initial start up of the system.

This is a welcome change and an audible sigh of relief could be heard across the gaming community today. What this means is that if you have the latest Call of Duty or Halo (TBD) and you want to loan it to your friend, you can just hand him or her the disk and they can play for as long as they want. If you don't have the latest Madden come NFL season, you can go rent it.

In order to make this change however, Microsoft had to make some sacrifices. What was sacrificed was the ability for 10 "family" members to have access to your library for play and if you want to play with someone, you both must now own the game. It's a small price to pay but in my eyes, very worth it.

So what do you guys think? Is this a welcome change? Has your faith in Microsoft been restored? I for one will now be running out to pre order my X-Box One now!

-Nurd!

SRCE: Xbox.com

Sony's Orbis

The next-gen consoles, by rumors, are stacking up to be quite the beasts for every ones enjoyments.

Rumors have recently surfaced for Sony's Playstation 4 or better known as the "Orbis". The claims of the Orbis is that it uses an AMD CPU and GPU and has a release date around the 2013 holiday season. Development kits are already suspected to be possession by 'select' gaming developers.

The CPU and GPU being discussed is and AMD x64 CPU and AMD Southern Islands GPU. The Southern Islands name is associated to a high end range of pc cards that boasts screen sizes of 4096×2160 and a full 3D gaming experience in 1080i.


While all this sounds great there are two major draw backs to the new Orbis. The Orbis is stated to not be backwards compatible with PS3 software but the most controversial downfall is that used games will no longer be able to be used on the system. The hardware is speculated to tie a game to a particular PSN account or even through some sort of digital download.

(In order to be non biased I feel compelled to inform you that the "X-Box 720" claims to have the same lock out on second hand games.)

The gaming industry stands on a back bone of its gamers. Part of said back bone is that of the used gaming community. Since the Atari, borrowing games and/or selling and trading games has always been a part of the gaming community. Video rental stores used to be a staple and in today's day and age, gaming parties.

Taking off of this to a personal aspect, I myself will buy a game and take it to a friends house to play and in my opinion, this helps push the gaming sales. No one wants to pay $60 for a game that no one knows what its like. I know my friends don't. I may be one of the daring but I'd hate to see a world where we push ourselves to only playing Mario, Halo, Gears of War, Street Fighter, and Final Fantasy. Without being able to rent a game or borrow one from a friend or even taking one to a friends house would kill not only the secondary market but also push all gamers back into solitude. Sure there's the advent of online gaming but gaming is social at its core. We all like to get together and play.

So what do you guys think about the revolution in gaming with the new Orbis? Ho do you feel about not being able to play used or shared games?

-"Nurd" Pat!