Xbox One

[Rosencrantz]

I dunno, I'm not really counting this system out yet because there's just a shitton of potential for this thing.

Like, sure, we've all been ripping on Kinect for years, but that's not stopping it from being a massive field of research from every techhead in academia, from the gamedevs to fucking medical doctors. If this new system is featuring an improved Kinect, there's way too much research already done for it; in other words, it'll be a massive disappointment if it's not any better this time around.

Then there's that whole "three operating systems" thing, which I think is pretty cool. This essentially boils down to two virtual machines that runs X-Box games on one side and running an app-based Windows 8 on the other side, with the third OS providing communication between the two consoles. So basically you can Skype and keep up with weather updates and maybe some Netflix while you're playing Halo 5. Multitasking.
(Hell, I'd even go as far to say that Microsoft might flip-flop and make this third OS capable of running older games, since part of the reason why this system can't do 360 games is because it's a re-written OS, but I know this is asking for a bit too much.)

And then we get to why this damn thing needs 100% online connectivity: apparently, it offloads a portion of its parallel computing to a Microsoft Cloud server system, so you wouldn't get dips in performance and such while the game is trying to run a script making a decision about what it should do next when you get to a certain point.



tl;dr: this isn't going to be much better than a good gaming rig, but I'll at least admit some of these decisions are actually kind of cool in a way. I'll keep my eye on this; I see no reason to be a dick and hate the system before it actually does anything~