This section is for all things anti-Xbox! Info, pictures, you name it! Anything to make fun of Microsft is in here. If technical specifications are your thing, here is a chart I made comparing the GCN, PS2, Xbox, DC, N64, and PSX. It's not complete, but it should answer most of your questions.

RUMOR: I was at Game X-Change a couple weeks ago(a game buy/trade/sell store), and as I was buying a game for my SNES, when I went to the front counter to pay for the game, he asked me if I knew about any of the new recent consoles. I said yes, and that I have a GameCube. He asked if I had a PS2 or an Xbox, and I said no. He asked why, and I told him PS2 is too expensive and has a crappy library and that Xbox just plain sucked. He agreed. Anyways, after I paid for the game, he asked if I wanted to know a secret. I said sure. He told me that the Xbox is actually just an experiment by Microsoft just to see if the consumers would go for such a thing by them. He also told me that there is a chip built into the Xbox so that it shuts down after one year. According to him, Microsoft is already working on the Xbox 2 and should be finished(if not at least announced) by the time the Xbox shuts down.

The following are reasons why the Microsoft Xbox is one of the industry's biggest disappointments in 3 categories: the technology, the market, and the gamers. Thanks to The Unoffical Anti-Xbox Page for the info. Read on.

Microsoft
The Infernal Machine
Price
The Games
The Competition
Anti-Xbox Websites
Anti-Xbox Clubs
Anti-Xbox Pictures

Microsoft

• Did you know that during a worldwide broadcast of Bill Gates using Windows 98, it crashed on him?
  
• An internal memo among Microsoft developers mentions 63,000 known defects in the initial Windows 2000 release. Microsoft did not deny the existence of the document, but claimed that the statements were made in order to "motivate the Windows development team". They went on to state that "Windows 2000 is the most reliable Windows so far."
  
• So that's 63,000 defects in Microsoft's best work. Don't forget that that is the OS operating your X-Box.
• People use to say that X-Box is in the same position that Sony was over 6 years ago. That they are newcomers to the console business. Those who said that have a bad memory. Sony designed the Sound chip for the Super Nintendo, as well as an CD-ROM add-on for the SNES, to counter-act the Sega CD. Well, various things happened. Sony didn't like Nintendo's policies, and the project was dumped. But the idea of that system lived on and became the Playstation.
  

• On The surface, the X-box would appear to be a very powerful machine. However, there are some things about the PS2 that make it more powerful than X-box.
  
• First, some technical stuff. Most modern 3D games use polygons, or multi-sided shapes, to represent a 3D world. Polygons are nothing more than a collection of three or more XYZ coordinates. Put enough of these polygons together, you have a car, a character, a weapon, a world, etc. More polygons means more detailed cars, characters, larger worlds, etc.
  
• Now, to move the car, or the character, etc, you have to calculate a new position for each of the points in each of the polygons. That requires lots of floating point math, specifically multiplication and division. The Emotion engine has two dedicated co-processors, VPU1 & VPU2, that are specially designed to do this math. That leaves the Emotion engine to calculate computer artificial intelligence, actual game code, and whatnot.
  
• The Emotion engine and the VPU's, the heart of the PS2, were built from scratch to be a dedicated games processor. The 733 MHz x86 Intel Pentium III, used in the X-Box, is descended from a line of processors designed back in the 70's to calculate and handle large amounts of text.
  
• For the record, the emotion Engine can do something like 6.4 Billion Floating Point Operations Per Second. Microsoft has not given its' numbers but I believe a Pentium III can do about 3.5 Billion FPO's per second. That's 50% less.
  
• Now, for some other technical stuff. The bits of processor, as in 32bit, or 128bit, basically means how much stuff can move in and out of the processor, as well as inside it. That means, for example, the 32bit P3 used in the X-Box can move around 32 bits, or 4K, of game information at a time. That could be polygon coordinates, game logic, or anything. This can all happen about 733 million times a second (733 megahertz), for a theoretical throughput of about 2.9 billion bytes per second. Now, the Emotion engine operates at 128bits, or 16K, at 300 Mhz, for a theoretical throughput of 4.8 billion bytes per second.
  
• Custom 3D nVidia Graphics Processor - As mentioned above, in a 3D game, the processor calculates new positions for each of the points in each of the polygons. It then sends these coordinates to the Graphics chip and the Graphics Chip draws them. So in other words, the capabilities of the processor will determine how many polygons, hence how detailed an image, can be pushed. So it doesn't matter if a chip can push 125 million polygons, if the processor can't keep up.
  
• But let’s take a closer look at that video chip. The original spec sheet for the X-Box shows a pixel fill rate of 4.0 Gpixels/PS (Billion Pixels Per Second), with Anti-Aliasing. This figure is a bit misleading. The NV2a, the chip used in the X-Box, has 4 pixel units, chips that actually draw the pixels, that operate at 250 MHz. 1 Hz = 1 pixel, and 4 pixels units x 250 MHz = 1.0 Gpixels/PS. So where did they get that 4.0 Gpixels/PS figure? It turns out that the NV2a uses oversampling, or redrawing every pixel to smooth out jagged edges. It does this four times for each pixel, so 4 times 1.0 Gpixels = 4.0 Gpixels/PS.
  
• For the record, the graphics chip in the PS2 has 16 pixel units, running at 150 MHz, for a throughput of 2.4 Gpixels/PS.
  
• So what about polygon’s? The industry standard size of a polygon is 32 pixels. Divide 4.0 Gpixels/PS by 32 pixels and you get 125 million polygons/PS. But remember that the X-Box can’t draw 4.0 Gpixels/PS, only 1.0 Gpixels. So now we get a polygon count of 31 million polygons/PS. For the record, divide 2.4Gpixels/PS, the throughput of the PS2, by 32 and you get 75,000,000 polygons per second.
  
• Now, these figures are just theoretical, raw numbers. Actual performance for both machines is lower. And these are unlit, unshaded, untextured polygons. When we add textures, or pictures added to the polygons to add detail, we get way different numbers.
  
• 64 MB of RAM (unified memory architecture - OK, more RAM can mean bigger game worlds, etc. Nintendo fans, they got us beat on that one, but it goes along with Moore's Law, so one would expect that it has more RAM. However, the 32 MB of memory in the GCN operates at 450 MHz, vs. the 200 MHz for the X-Box. That means information information in can be sorted around, modified, etc. two times faster than the X-Box. That can make a difference.
  
• 10 GB Hard Drive - Many people have mixed feelings about this, for both the PS2 and the X-Box. On the one hand, a hard drive would add a tremendous amount of depth to a console, allowing unlimited game saves, new game content, etc, to be loaded and stored. On the other hand, hard drives are one of the first things to fail on a computer, and I doubt either Sony nor Microsoft are using the best hard drives on the market. What happens when the hard drive fails? Do you lose all your information. Are you able to swap hard drives? The good thing about Sony's hard drive though, is it is removeable. So when it goes kablooey, you won't have to replace the whole unit. You also have to worry about fragmentation, or corruption. One could easily say that it's possible that the X-Box hard drive could be used for patches, though some say they wouldn't. Well, what evidence do you have that it won't? Microsoft's good word? Nintendo was smart with the GameCube and did not make a hard drive at all.
  
• 4X DVD drive with movie playback - Not much to say about this one, except that yes, it was a smart move, but what the heck is with that add on required? That was a stupid move by Microsoft. When people got their PS2, one of the first things they could do after hooking it up was to play a DVD on it. They liked the fact that I could play a DVD right out of the box. How much do you wanna bet Microsoft will not advertise this little 'feature' of having to buy a separate periphial? Probably just in tiny print on page 46 of the manual, right before the Spanish section. Personally, I think the DVD playback abilited is stupid. Consoles like the X-Box and PS2 are becoming too much like computers. Monitors, , hard drives, keyboards, mice, online play, and now DVD playback capability? The GameCube is a video game console, what it should be, whereas the X-Box and PS2 are "home entertainment theatres". The whole point of DVD players are to have them separate from the TVs. If the DVD players were built into TVs, do you the manufacturers would make as much money? NO!
  
• But a bigger question is, why did Microsoft even offer this capability? They could have just put a DVD-rom drive inside for the more storage, and not bothered with the movie playback, which costs more licensing money. I remember Microsoft saying that the X-box will be purely a game playing console, not a home entertainment unit the way Sony was pushing the PS2. So why include the DVD movie playback capability, if it will be used just for games?
  
• 100 MBps Ethernet - It's good in theory, but consider this. First of all, broadband is not available everywhere. What are the people living in the sticks gonna do for connectivity?
  
• Most people who have broadbrand are probably getting it from ATT, Rogers or Shaw who, for a monthly fee, provide the service, and rent out the cable modem. I don't know about the rest of the world, but our broadband only comes out of one outlet and we've got just the one cable modem, and that's near the computer, which is nowhere near the TV.
  
• Another issue with broadband is the fact that it's always on. This would allow would-be hackers to access the X-box (or PS2) and do whatever. While I'm pretty sure that you won't be upset if you're Abe's Oddyssey save games are stolen, you'd probably be pissed if someone used your X-Box for denial-of-service attacks, or erased your boot-up ROM. I'm sure it won't be too long before the first X-Box virii and trojan horses appear, especially with a well documented, Windows 2000 operating system.
  
• The Console Design - This is a matter of personal preference, but I don't like the look of the console, or the controller. The console looks like a big, bulky, 80's style VCR, or as people on the IGN Boards have called it, "it feels like canned ham". The controller looks like a rehash of the Genesis, Saturn, Dreamcast and Playstation controllers amalgamated into one. And again, as a matter of personal preference, what's with that big green sphere on the controller? Blech.
  

• The price of the X-Box $299 USD was confirmed, which was somewhat smart because a) That's PS2's price; and b) anything over that will kill it.
  
• But let's take a look at this. First of all, the Gamecube came out about a week after and for $100 USD cheaper. There's also rumors of a PS2 price drop sometime soon. Anyway, when you break down the components it comes in at a unit price of around $450. Microsoft makes probably $275 revenue from each console sold. (Retailers make very little from selling a console, but they do get some perks from manufacturers.) So Microsoft is losing about $175 per console. Now that unit cost will come down eventually, but not anytime soon. They, like all console manufacturers, plan to recoup losses through game liscensing fees.
  
• But what if that doesn't happen? Right now, Sony is happy with PS2 game sales. They're making up the loss from each hardware unit sold. But what if people find another use for the X-Box. What if someone developed a webserver for the X-box, or ported Linux? They could have a cheap, relatively fast and powerful webserver. The same thing could be said of PS2, but with X-Box having more RAM, a built-in ethernet port and hardrive, and a more widely used operating system, it would be the choice of someone who would do that.
  
• So, if a lot of people are using X-Box for something other than their intended purpose, they won't be buying games. And if Microsoft can't recoup the losses through current licensing fees, they'd have to raise them, leading to more expensive games, leading to less being bought, leading to less licensing revenue, and so on.
  

• The usual crop of games appears. You've got some sports games, some action games, some computer ports, some ports from other systems.
  
• The only game that interests me is Halo. From reading up on it, it offers some interesting possibilities, and Bungie(the developer) is making a big mistake not porting it to PS2 or GameCube.
  
• Some important names are missing from the developer list. Namely Square. Square makes some excellent RPG's, which are important when pushing a console. This is pretty much next to impossible for Microsoft though as Sony bought 19% of Square last October.
  
• Let's take a closer look at the Microsoft games, and how they relate to Microsoft's software track record. Now, granted, there's no such thing, nor will there ever be, bug-free software. Programmers are only human, they make mistakes, and things slip through.
  
• As I've said before, Windows 2000 was released with 63,000 known defects, and that it was considered Microsoft's "best work." Of course that's the known defects. God knows how many unknown there were.
  
• In Windows 2000, the "head" icon of a group will have it's hair turned gray, if there's more than 500 people in that group. It's just a stupid little thing that probably one of the junior programmer's put in, and doesn't do anything, but makes one wonder how it slipped past quality control.
  
• There's also some easter eggs in Word 97 and Excel 97 that allow you to play a pinball game and a flight simulator. If stupid things like that can get past quality control, it makes you wonder about important things, like stability issues, etc. As well, Microsoft carries no ISO9000 quality certification, or any other quality certification for that matter, and most likely does not intend to.
  
• And if they let major security issues go by in $2000 a license Windows 2000, what do you think they'll let by in a $50 dollar game?
  

• Microsoft has a very tough struggle ahead of it. There has not been a successful American made console in over fifteen years.
  
• Dreamcast is out right now, it's cheap(less than $50), it lets anyone play online against other people, and it has an extensive library of some great games.
  
• Playstation 2 is also right now, has some good games, and has a great future of ahead of it(if Sony can get it's act together). Not to mention the loyalty of 75 million Playstation 1 owners.
  
• The GameCube has the loyalty of a generation of gamers who remember what Nintendo did for this industry. It's cheap($200) and has an innovative controller(comfy too). Mario, Zelda, Metroid and countless others also help out a bit, too.
  
• The X-box has the reputation of Microsoft behind it. Wait...that's not good. Well, it can function as a DVD player. Wait...you need a special remote for that.
  
• Let's not forget Microsoft's "Third-Times-A-Charm Curse." Its states that the first two versions of a Microsoft product will be absolute dogs, and by the third time, they'll have something. It happened with Windows, it happened with Office, it happened with DirectX, and it's happening with Windows CE. Judging by that track record, it could happen to the X-box. But you don't get second chances in the console business. That's why we don't see Panasonic or Phillips making video game systems any more(thank Jeebus!).
  
  Return to Table of Contents
  
  Anti-Xbox Websites
  
  The Unoffical Anti-Xbox Page
  
  Anti-Xbox Clubs
  
  antiplaystation2andxbox
  anti_xbox
  antixbox
  xboxhatersrealm
  xboxsucks
  xboxsucksalot
  
  Anti-Xbox Pictures
  
  Xbox vs. GameCube
  Mama mia! This Xbox is some sort of demon!
  The Xbox is whisper quiet!
  As usual, the Xbox requires service.
  Even at an important press conference, the Xbox won't give lil' Billy any slack.
  Xbox in bulk.