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Comment on "Initial Xbox 360 Impressions"
by Michael Brundage — Mar 01
[p]I work on Xbox backwards compatibility, so I'm glad to read that you're enjoying the console and figured I would de-lurk.[/p]

[p]It's probably not the fan noise that you're hearing, but the 12x DVD drive. The outer edge of a DVD disc spinning at 12x is travelling at over 100mph, making for some decent noise. You can verify this by ejecting the disc -- if the noise continues then it's the fans, but if it stops it was the DVD disc. Movies and original Xbox games spin a little slower and will thus play more quietly. Personally, I don't notice the noise coming from my console (in the stereo cabinet across the room), but obviously YMMV.[/p]

[p]You might want to check out the demos on Xbox Live Marketplace -- NFS:MW and Condemned (which is pretty cool and scary) and some others might appeal to you.[/p]

[p]Personally, I didn't like PDZ at all (I've heard the multiplayer is great, but it lost me before I got there) and I'm not into racing games. But I'm loving the Xbox Live Arcade games -- many of them (Marble Blast Ultra, Hexic, Geometry Wars and Zuma) are really, really fun. Other than Arcade, the only full games I've really gotten into have been Call of Duty 2 and Amped 3 (which isn't for everyone, but I like it). Obviously it's a personal choice -- some people are really excited about Oblivion -- but I'm eagerly awaiting Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter and Gears of War (and sure, Halo 3). Until then, it's mostly Arcade and original Xbox games for me :-)[/p]


There seems to be a lot of negative press about the 360 floating around, why does this exist?

I'm not totally sure.


[p]Don't even get me started -- the gaming press have changed me from "not believing everything I read online" to not believing anything I read online.[/p]
[p]It seems like every week there's a new rumor, that gets repeated by five more "news" organizations, each time changing slightly until it reaches a frenzied crescendo completely divorced from reality. For example, a podcast on majornelson.com by our marketing director in which he said we would be taking vacation (this was before Christmas) and probably aiming for another update in the Spring snowballed into the team taking vacation "throughout January" and "Microsoft halts work on backwards compatibility." Both of which are nonsense, but surprisingly many people will believe it just because it was printed as news. Or take the articles claiming Microsoft sold only 600K consoles in the US, soon followed by our quarterly report completely refuting that and now some articles claiming that in fact we'll beat our own sales projections for June. Apparently they can't make up their mind whether we're vastly under or over projected sales numbers.[/p]
[p]Just my personal opinion, but I think the gaming press is a mess. I find the best sources of accurate information are just word of mouth from people's personal experiences, such as blog entries like this one. Everything else is biased heavily by agendas and spin. Of course, not even all blogs can be believed -- you know that there will be fake ones praising (or railing against) some products, but hopefully most of them are honest and real. [/p]
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