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Forums - Gaming Discussion - The Xbox 360 Was Probably the Best Engineered Video Game Console Ever

 

What is the best Engineered Video Game Console Ever?

Xbox 360 127 13.86%
 
PS4 405 44.21%
 
SNES 123 13.43%
 
Dreamcast 62 6.77%
 
Atari 2600 12 1.31%
 
None of the above 187 20.41%
 
Total:916
Shackkobe on 27 April 2015
Ruler said:
Shackkobe said:

Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft have all released mainstream video game consoles. From the Atari 2600 all the way up to the Xbox One, different consoles have been released, with many different hardware configurations.

Some of the engineering gave rise to great consoles like the Super NES with its unique ability to have hardware upgrades built into the game cartridge itself, and others like the Playstation 3 which was so hard to develop for, developers needed at least one year to learn how to program effectively for the console.

But out of all the engineering choices made, the design choices behind the Xbox 360 stand out to me as probably the best ever.

The tri core CPU, GPU(with unified shaders), 512MB unified RAM, 10MB eDRAM, excellent controller, easy game development and superb online infrastructure made it an almost perfect gaming console.  These design choices were so good, they influenced the development of ALL of the 8th gen consoles. So good was the design, I am led to believe that there was no need for Microsoft to have rushed the manufacturing, which led to the Xbox 360 being released only four years after the original Xbox. This rush to market caused them to incur the now legendary failure rate of the first wave of Xbox 360s.

Yes, Sony messed up the ps3’s launch. But a big reason for their gigantic loss of market share was due to the fact that they had a rival console which was simply one of the best engineered consoles ever. Console sales, software library, game performance and developer praise all support this line of thinking.

 

 

 

Feel free to leave your thoughts below.

Not all, there were so many stronger designed consoles for its time like the Neo Geo.

Uhm...at least I justified my viewpoint with a few facts...



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SanAndreasX on 27 April 2015

I'd hesitate to call something well-engineered that had such an abysmal failure rate.



Ckorik on 27 April 2015

Well there was the fact that it would eat DVDs if moved while the drive was spinning.

That was due to a 25 cent foam pad that was standard on all DVD drives - indicating that the removal of that from the proprietary DVD included in the XBOX (you couldn't replace it with an off the shelf drive) was an intentional engineering removal - to save about one quarter per unit sold.



Manlytears on 27 April 2015

Best Engineered Video Game Console Ever? And you don't put the original playstation on the list! that is just crazy wrong.



Mandalore76 on 27 April 2015

I enjoy(ed) my XBox 360 (slim now), but I can't call it the best engineered video game console ever when taking that failure rate into account.  Because, you know, that's a result of engineering.  There's just no way around that.  My brother and I both had 360's suffer the RROD.  So, best engineered?  No. 



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Leadified on 27 April 2015

My vote goes to the Gamecube followed by the original Xbox. Both were pretty powerful and very durable.



Captain_Tom on 27 April 2015

Is this a joke? It didn't even work, and when it did it sounded like a vacuum cleaner!

Not to mention a lack of wifi, bluray, bluetooth, and HDD as standard.

Yeah the slim fixed everything - many years too late.



Captain_Tom on 27 April 2015
Ckorik said:
Well there was the fact that it would eat DVDs if moved while the drive was spinning.
That was due to a 25 cent foam pad that was standard on all DVD drives - indicating that the removal of that from the proprietary DVD included in the XBOX (you couldn't replace it with an off the shelf drive) was an intentional engineering removal - to save about one quarter per unit sold.

Forgot that too!  I had several friends that lost games to their 360 - and then told me it wasn't a big deal!

Sometimes your console eats a game, and that doesn't bug you?! Stockholm syndrome at its finest!



alabtrosMyster on 27 April 2015
Shackkobe said:

Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft have all released mainstream video game consoles. From the Atari 2600 all the way up to the Xbox One, different consoles have been released, with many different hardware configurations.

Some of the engineering gave rise to great consoles like the Super NES with its unique ability to have hardware upgrades built into the game cartridge itself, and others like the Playstation 3 which was so hard to develop for, developers needed at least one year to learn how to program effectively for the console.

But out of all the engineering choices made, the design choices behind the Xbox 360 stand out to me as probably the best ever.

The tri core CPU, GPU(with unified shaders), 512MB unified RAM, 10MB eDRAM, excellent controller, easy game development and superb online infrastructure made it an almost perfect gaming console.  These design choices were so good, they influenced the development of ALL of the 8th gen consoles. So good was the design, I am led to believe that there was no need for Microsoft to have rushed the manufacturing, which led to the Xbox 360 being released only four years after the original Xbox. This rush to market caused them to incur the now legendary failure rate of the first wave of Xbox 360s.

Yes, Sony messed up the ps3’s launch. But a big reason for their gigantic loss of market share was due to the fact that they had a rival console which was simply one of the best engineered consoles ever. Console sales, software library, game performance and developer praise all support this line of thinking.

 

 

 

Feel free to leave your thoughts below.


I think the Sega Genesis model 1 was the best console ever made

 - Both graphics and sound capabilities were amazing for the time

 - It's 68000 CPU was fast enough to allow games with nice special effects without the use of special chips!.. games with little to now slow downs, very few flickeing, etc. that was a UGE improvement over anything else available before (and even after to some degree)... the architecture was common so programmers knew how to program for it from the get go!

 - These machines just do not die, compared to them Nintendo consoles are just un-reliable

 - It has a great library

and it has a CD add-on!

Second would be the Dreamcast... PS4 if it was not so noizy!the PC Engine was an amaxing thing to have has well... SNES was a graphics processing powerhouse upon release too.

Maybe the first xbox would fit in a list of well engineered consoles... the 360 missed on HDMI, was probably the least reliable console ever, it had some good benefits, but the downsides are too big to ignore, engineering is about trade offs, trading off reliability to this degree is never a good choice.



WolfpackN64 on 27 April 2015

The 360 is one of my favorite consoles... Makes me wonder at some of the design choices of the Xbox One.