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THINKING INSIDE THE BOX: WHY I DON'T LIKE THE NEW XBOX ONE S - by Mr Biffo

3/8/2016

19 Comments

 
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Have you seen HBO's Silicon Valley? I just binged on Season 3 of the tech startup-based sitcom. It's brilliant, incidentally, if you've missed it. Start at the beginning/begin at the start.

​Without delving into spoiler territory, one recurring thread of Season 3 is the design/marketing/selling of a box.

​It's never entirely explained what the box does - some sort of cyber security thing - the joke being around its uninspired, box-like design (of course, reaching the final, bland, rectangular model, requires a lengthy and pretentious design process).

​Remind you of anything?
S-CLUB 7
So, the Xbox One S, then. It's out now, priced at £349 for the launch day 2TB model (there'll be subsequent releases with smaller hard drives, for some reason).

People seem quite excited about it. Yes, plenty of storage. Yes, integrated power brick. New joypad that'll work with your PC, if you have one. 4K Blu-Ray support for that 4K TV you don't actually own, and probably won't ever bother with after you got burnt by that 3DTV you spent thousands on. Oh, and it's 40% smaller than the previous Xbox One ("The smallest Xbox yet"), and doesn't have a socket for the Kinect 2.0 to plug into it. 

But... it's just another box, isn't it? It's a white box, with a slot and some holes. The design is the most uninspired design of a thing since the current generation of consoles first arrived. I despair. I despair at how excited the industry seems to be about a redesign that - frankly - feels like a case of correcting past mistakes.

Anything which the Xbox One S offers is stuff that should've been there three years ago. Namely no Kinect, and without that ludicrous, family car-sized power thing, that you kept tripping over. The number of people who'll benefit from the 4K Blu-Ray compatibility is minimal - alright, it helps to future-proof the technology, but that's not the same thing as innovating. That's not a reason to be excited for it. It isn't sexy, or cool, or fun. It lacks character, and a sense of identity. It's a shrug, in box form.

​It probably needed to be released, but the hoo-hah surrounding it won't bleed through to the normals. You know: the non-geeks. They're not going to care, in the way that some of us in this walled-off gaming community care.
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THE OLD MAN
I'm getting old. It's my birthday in a couple of days. I'm halfway through my 40s. I get that it would be cliche of me to whine about things being better in the olden days.

Unfortunately, they were better in the olden days, in terms of the aesthetics of console design.

When I started my career as a games journalist, more than two decades ago, the Super NES and Mega Drive were the market leading games machines.

In the ten years or so which followed, we had the Nintendo 64, Game Cube, Dreamcast, Jaguar, PlayStation... all of them, in their own way, iconic.

I've had my Xbox One and PlayStation 4 sitting under my telly for years now, and I don't think I could describe either one of them to you. I couldn't even draw a picture. They're interchangeable slabs of black. Now the Xbox One has switched to white, which merely makes it interchangeable with the Wii U.

Where's the sense of fun and taking a risk gone? In the time I've been writing about games, I've seen consoles go from being toys, to trying a bit too hard to be cool, and now they're trying to disappear, blend in, be as invisible as all your other consumer electronics.

​Why does it have to be this way?

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GROWN UP
Why is the games industry - or, at least, Sony and Microsoft - so intent on making their hardware look grown-up?

I've got a toaster - a machine which makes bread all crispy and hot - which has been designed with more of a sense of joy than the Xbox One/Xbox One S/PlayStation 4. 

Are current console design philosophies meant to offer us technology which is as unthreatening as possible? Are they embarrassed by the fact that consoles are, essentially, toys? They're for playing. If you go to a jungle gym you don't expect it to look like a corporate boardroom. Yet that's exactly what the redesign of the Xbox One S suggests. What is the message that the Xbox One S is attempting to convey?

Microsoft's hardware lags behind the PS4. The Xbox One hasn't been a flop exactly, but it has struggled to narrow the lead of its closest rival. The Xbox One S would've been the perfect opportunity to take a risk, go nuts, tell people - through the design of the hardware - that the Xbox One S is the machine they should get.

The one which offers a gateway to entertainment possibilities the likes of which your tiny human mind could never have previously conceived, and will be a talking point when sat under the telly.

Show some ambition. Grow a pair of balls. Think outside of the damn box for once.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
WHAT DOES THE XBOX LOGO LOOK LIKE?
PLEASE, FATHER, HOW DID THEY COMBAT BAD GAMES PIRACY BACK IN THE DAY?
A SELECTED HISTORY OF ISOMETRIC GRAPHICS

19 Comments
Acid_Arrow
3/8/2016 11:02:26 am

Remember the disastrous back-tracking launch of the XBOX One? They kept going on about it being a general multi-media entertainment centre when really people just wanted to see what games it had. They are still pushing this line and I think they ARE actually embarrassed that it's primarily for games.

I personally liked the black and green theme of the original XBOX, it looked distinctive and cool even if the actual box design itself was a bit generic. But I guess such a colour scheme may clash with the clean, white lines of the designer flats that we all live and use our multi-media entertainment centres in.

Reply
Mark Trapplebensom
3/8/2016 11:19:17 am

The PS4 IS designed in a striking original way though, it has that exaggerated, impossible-to-miss lean. It's pointedly, deliberately not just a box. Are you ignoring this in the interests of artificial parity?

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Mr Biffo
3/8/2016 11:44:23 am

I dunno. Are you ignoring *THIS* in the interests of artificial parity.

Admittedly, you can't see what "this" is, but trust me - you wouldn't like it.

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Mark Trapplebensom
3/8/2016 12:23:35 pm

Well anyway thanks for making me aware of it's existence, now I can ignore in earnest.

Were you designing a console, what form would it take?

FEoD link
4/8/2016 07:57:19 pm

I'll be massively disappointed if Biffo was pointing anywhere but his groin at the precise moment he typed "this" because that's what I'd have been doing...

Stuart
3/8/2016 12:16:13 pm

I guess this all started with the PS1, which, back in the day, was positioned as kind of a 'lifestyle product', like a CD player (which it also was). The move to CD's wasn't merely technological; it was also aesthetic: no longer were consoles overtly demonstrating their centrality as games machines, having proud erections in the form of cartridges sticking out top (usually the most brightly-coloured and attractive part of the machine, when inserted). Games storage media were and still are safely hidden within these dull, boxy exteriors, which are in turn ensconced within further dull, boxy exteriors: the living rooms of their owners Acid_Arrow mentions.

My PS1 used to be a stolid grey; now it's a sort of sad yellow. The future will probably continue this trend. The technology of the Star Wars universe was beat up, lived in, relatable; our world made a stab at sleek minimalism, but ages into dusty, alienating mediocrity - a new form of 'soft brutalism' or Soviet bloc.

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Chris
3/8/2016 12:43:26 pm

I think it all started with the Commodore CDTV, and - to a lesser extent - the Philips CD-i. Both of these were trying to be multimedia entertainment devices rather than gaming machines. The CDTV was unquestionably designed to look like a hi-fi separate. The CD-i appears to think itself a VCR. Both flopped, probably because nobody could fathom out what they were supposed to do.

The XBox One has fallen into the same trap. Multimedia features, looks like some sort of consumer tech rather than a games machine, nobody really sure what it does.

Reply
Scott C
3/8/2016 09:31:56 pm

Don't forget the 3DO either!

Spiney O'Sullivan
3/8/2016 03:06:41 pm

Arguably it started with the American/European NES, redesigned from the Japan's Famicom to resemble something more VCR-like than other home videogame systems by way of making them seem a bit different from the various failed systems that people had scattered around their homes and bins as the home videogame market crashed in the early 80s.

The Megadrive/Genesis looked like a piece of hifi equipment, as did the PlayStation. Basically the idea has typically been to make games seem like a thing that goes along with your other nondescript home entertainment stuff, instead of as a toy. The XBone is just the ultimate expression of that.

Reply
Darren link
3/8/2016 12:34:12 pm

A box is a box is a box...

What kind of aesthetic do you want from your console? Considering mine are hidden behind my TV, they could have put the Xbox One in a loosely tied hessian sack and it wouldn't have given a shit about it.

"Oh but look at the design of the PS4"

What? It's a black box too.

It's what's inside the box that counts - what the black box does is the whole point of the box. You see guys, you've got to think inside of the box.

The Xbox One S is pointless. It's for those who spunked their benefits payments on a UHD TV but can't find any content to play on it - a bit like the early days of HD TV. I'm normally an early adopter of these things but the Xbox One S removes Kinect functionality and gives it back to you via a handy adaptor which is uglier than your mum.

I like Kinect - I enjoy Cortana not understanding a fucking word I say because I'm from London. I like tormenting my kids because they try to use it and it doesn't recognise them either and I pretend that my Xbox is only locked into my vocal patterns.

But yeah, a box...

I'll keep my black slab because it does what the white one does, but more. And no, I don't have a Netflix account either...so fuck that shit right up the arsehole.

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DrDagless
3/8/2016 12:34:57 pm

That's all very well and good, but when Nintendo goes full crazy and releases a console that looks like a miniature Dave Benson Phillips we'll be telling them to get back IN the box. Mark my words...

Reply
AcidBeard
3/8/2016 05:25:42 pm

The NX has detachable Chris Akabusii and you can plug it into your Pat Sharp from Fun House to connect it to your Jeremy Beadle.

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Neth
3/8/2016 01:48:29 pm

This is the biggest load of bullshit since they released the Wonderswan and it looked NOTHING like a swan.

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lilock3
3/8/2016 01:54:16 pm

It's all to make it possible to render an accurate depiction of each console in teletext graphics. I've noticed a marked increase in the number of teletext adverts being produced over the last few weeks; this is clearly the future of advertising and MS & Sony have cottoned onto it!

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Walter Peck
3/8/2016 01:55:26 pm

The PS4 is a design marvel. It's like Sony just skipped straight to the revised slim edition.

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colincidence link
3/8/2016 05:29:17 pm

Which console do you find most beautiful? And which handheld?
I want to say the Dreamcast but mine is so yellowed.

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Spiney O'Sullivan
3/8/2016 06:19:03 pm

I really love the design of the PSone. Tiny and sleek, with a softer shape and lighter pastel colour scheme than the PSX. A great little machine.

The N64 also holds up nicely too in pretty much any colour (Excluding that awful Pikachu version).

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PeskyFletch
4/8/2016 12:48:37 pm

Gamecube for me

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Kelvin Green link
3/8/2016 06:36:52 pm

I think it's because the companies don't want consoles to be seen as toys even though that's what they are, so that's why they end up looking like 1980's hifi kit. If they did a bright colourful machine with big bright buttons and -- gasp! -- curves, you'd get snooty "hardcore" brodude types looking down their noses at it and calling it a kiddie console. You saw a bit of that with the Gamecube, even though it looked better than both the PS2 and the first X-Brick.

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