Xbox, can you hear me now? One requires repetition

Ouch! I do want to play Titan Fall! But my Ps4 will be here in about 3 weeks. I will forget all about Titan Fall once I am playing Shadow Fall (Killzone)

I might sound all fuddy-duddy here, but I do miss the 90s when video games were easy to pick up and start playing, and did not require a 30-page manual and a 200-page volume of tips and tricks.

Used to really enjoy Rainbow Six on PC, LOVED Grand Turismo 2 on PS1. Played Final Fantasy 7 and 8 in my teens which in some ways influenced the type of girls I find attractive at the time (can someone say nerd?)

Video games used to be an outlet for stress/monotony, but these days I get stressed trying to learn to play a new video game, with the average game having a 10-hour learning curve. I'm glad I put my video gaming days behind me. I get much more out of watching a good movie than a gaming session.

Didn't know AP was such a Playstation fan boy, reads like one.

"did not require a 30-page manual and a 200-page volume of tips and tricks." Huh. I haven't had to do that SINCE the 90's. Grandpa... is that you? Wow. I am 100% opposite of you. I used to be movie nerd even a short film maker, but gave that up and play more and more games in my 30's than I did in my 20's and teen. Movies have gotten horrible. Worse and Worse. So hard to find a decent movie these. Their are some. But not many. I think you should give gaming a try. Last of Us on PS3 was a BREEZE to play and one of the best games ever made. Had a story and character development better than 98% of the movies I have seen in the last 5 years. One of the most emotionally intense piece of any time of entertainment I have enjoyed all year. Same goes for Walking Dead game. Those are two games that you don't need to be twitch gamer good at to enjoy. Sure I enjoy a good FPS game. Battle Field games are one of the single most intense things I have experience in my life. Up there with riding down the highway on my motorcycle at 140kph. I could go on and on and on. Games today have something to offer everyone. My wife and I are both addicted to tower defense games like Plants Vs. Zombies. There is a reason Hollywood is making less money now than it did 10 years ago and Video games are now grossing , and have been for over 5 years, more money than Hollywood. Some games today are total crap. Others are works of Art. I have hard time saying that about movies these days. I have seen maybe 3 or 4 really good movies. 1 was a documentary (Searching for Sugarman) and the 2 others were comedies... how bad do movies have to be when some of the best ones are comides. sad!

I think the critics are being a bit unreasonable. I'm not a console fan, in fact I don't own any, so I'm pretty neutral here. Voice recognition systems always need a bit of training and expecting one to function flawlessly on the first try every time is setting an unrealistically high standard... for example, with humans (who are experts at processing vocal input) we sometimes have to repeat stuff... and with my kids sometimes I have to repeat stuff 10 or 20 times before they hear me and continue to do exactly what they want.

Frungy, so you think the spokesman doing the demo did it with this Xbox for the first time during the presentation... I highly doubt that.

about 10 of 45 voice commands issued had to be repeated by a Microsoft spokesman

10 out of 45 is not bad. Even Dragon Naturally Speaking Software, whose technology Siri is based on, needs some training to get used to the user's voice and speaking manner. Only if you use it more that it gets better.

The concept of bundling Kinect is a catch-22 thing. Users won't use it much unless there are many useful uses developed for it, but developers won't develop many uses for it unless there are enough users. So Microsoft has to bundle it if they want to ensure developers that there would be enough people who could use it, but thus forcing people to pay for it even if they're unsure if they'd use it.

That is a gamble, but not as big a gamble as this:

McQuivey said because Microsoft has turned its attention to other audiences besides just gamers, they could potentially sell half as many Xbox Ones as they did Xbox 360s over the next-gen console's lifetime, especially if the system doesn't work as advertised.

Microsoft is gambling XB1 as an all-in-one home entertainment device. Like many devices these days, the hot word right now is convergence, people wanting devices that could do much more than one thing (e.g. a phone is not just a phone now, TVs are smart TVs, bluray players with online streaming, etc.) Only time will tell if there are enough home entertainment users as dedicated as gamers in splurging for this (although remember, people spend >$500 for a tablet).

I often wonder why people buy Microsoft products - seriously.

Unless you're prepared to spend hours futzing with them, they just don't work.

Yesterday I sat next to a person who was doing something that I thought was so simple, it should have been a 30 second job. All she had to do was copy part of the email that I had sent and paste it into a Photoshop document. It took her 30 minutes. Partly because Photoshop froze up the computer three times and we had to wait for it to reboot and then, when she finally got it done, the font, size and formatting were totally different, so it looked absolutely crap.

On a Mac or an iPad, this would have been done in seconds.

And now the XBox doesn't work.

Voice commands and dictation work perfectly on Macs, iPhones and iPads. How come, with all its resources, Microsoft can't get a product out that works first time?

I expect after several versions, they will eventually get it right. But I wonder what it is that people will put up with this kind of rubbish.

The behaviour described in the article above isn't even Beta, it's Alpha.

Buy XBox and become an unpaid Beta tester!

I often wonder why people buy Microsoft products - seriously.

Because a lot of their business products are second to none, for example Excel doesn't really have any challenger. .Net Framework and the Visual Studio has been a blessing for programmers. Microsoft Lync with all of its bells and whistles is probably the best business communication software on the planet. But they do have weakness in the business area like their Database technologies

Obviously another weakness is they are not a consumer friendly software but for the business users/power users they really can't be beat.

Apple make very consumer friendly software but they don't exactly make very good business and or enterprise level software.

Voice commands and dictation work perfectly on Macs, iPhones and iPads.

Voice doesn't always work correctly for my Siri, though it works most of the time but not as the same level as my Dragon (as I mentioned above, same technology). And Apple messed up their maps the first time, lest we forget.