A Game Plan for Picking the Right Box

By AARON CURTISS

Nov. 15, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

About a dozen times a week, someone asks which video game console to buy this winter: Microsoft’s Xbox, Nintendo’s GameCube or Sony’s PlayStation 2.

The questions are more urgent these days. PlayStation 2 has been on the market for more than a year. Microsoft launches Xbox today. And GameCube lands on store shelves Sunday. As holiday shoppers tussle their way toward digital nirvana, they should make sure they’re clawing and scratching for the right box.

Mistakes can be costly--$200 or more for the box alone and about $50 per game.

Each of the three consoles has its own personality and has been crafted to appeal to a specific type of game player.

In general, here’s a rough guide for deciding which console to buy. For kids younger than 12, go with GameCube and its tot-friendly fare. For teens and young adults into action games, get an Xbox. For an overall family machine with a wide range of games, it’s PS2. At the risk of sounding overly philosophical, the first step toward video game happiness is knowing what will make you happy.

In purely technical terms, Xbox offers the most versatility right away. Its built-in hard drive and high-speed Internet connection make the $300 Xbox the most PC-like of all the consoles and provide the opportunity for multi-player games with deeper levels. For at least the first year, Microsoft is targeting the green-and-black Xbox at hard-core gamers who set the rules for cool.

The $200 GameCube focuses on the basics. It’s a game machine, pure and simple. Aiming squarely at a younger audience, Nintendo is counting on its family-friendly tradition to sell its petite purple cube. As the only platform to host traditionally superb Nintendo franchises such as Mario, GameCube enjoys a base of warm, fuzzy support among gamers raised on Donkey Kong with kids of their own.

With a year to build up a strong library of titles, Sony’s $300 PlayStation 2 enjoys the widest variety of games--more than 200. The sleek, black PS2 also is the most like a traditional piece of consumer electronics equipment. It plays DVD movies and audio CDs right out of the box and aims at the great, wide middle of the game-playing universe. Like Microsoft, Sony plans to introduce a hard drive and modem, but at additional cost.

What the consoles have in common is that many popular games will be released on all three platforms. So if you’ve just got to have the latest installment of “Madden” football, you’ll get it no matter which box you buy. Independent game publishers need to put out games for every box to make money in these days of rising production costs and fragmented tastes.

The main difference between the machines lies in the handful of exclusive headliner titles, such as “Ico” on PlayStation 2, “Halo” on Xbox and “Luigi’s Mansion” on GameCube. So if there’s a certain game you absolutely must play, that naturally limits the choice of boxes.

Here’s how the boxes stack up.

Microsoft Xbox: There’s been a lot of kvetching by game purists over Microsoft’s entry into the console business. After the Xbox’s coming-out party at the Electronic Entertainment Expo last May in Los Angeles, some wags griped that the games were sub-par and that the box was poorly engineered.

Now that it’s here, though, the Xbox delivers the goods. After playing Xbox for a couple of weeks, it’s clear that Microsoft has produced a console to be reckoned with. Many of the games in the initial lineup are exquisitely addictive. Although made of many PC components, Xbox suffers none of its big brother’s flakiness or instability, and its 733-megahertz processor chugs along smoothly.

By far the biggest of the three consoles, Xbox packs considerable power in its tubby guts.

An 8-gigabyte hard drive, the first for a set-top console, allows players to save game data, copy CD music tracks and buffer massive levels. In games such as “Halo,” players can spend an hour in a single level without seeing the annoying “Loading ... “ message so common on other disc-based machines. All that happens is the occasional hiccup as players pass a threshold and new data get loaded into RAM.

The hard drive also allows players to customize music mixes that can be played in lieu of a game’s standard soundtrack. Rip your favorite sonatas beforehand and then let them play. Other console games have allowed similar flexibility, but users had to pop out the game disc and swap it with a music CD. The hard drive allows all that to be done on the fly.

Microsoft clearly sees a future in online gaming. Xbox comes with a built-in Ethernet adapter to connect gamers around the world. Problem is, most people don’t have high-speed Internet connections--yet. But that’s clearly the direction in which consumer electronics and entertainment companies want the consuming public to go. For early adopters, Xbox promises a slick, fast online experience. The rest of the world will have to catch up. Meanwhile, players can connect two Xboxes together and play against each other on separate TV screens.

Xbox renders some powerful eye candy. Its custom Nvidia graphics system delivers seamless polygons, the shapes that give digital images a three-dimensional look. Every game played during our test was visually delicious. Fighters in “Dead or Alive3” move smoothly. Mudokkons in “Oddworld: Munch’s Oddysee” crowd the screen without a slowdown.

With the chubbiest controller on the market, Xbox is built for American hands. Many players have complained that the controller is too big and unwieldy. I happen to think it’s the best controller of any console. Even after hours of constant play, my hands felt relaxed--not cramped the way they do with smaller controllers. The button placement is logical and easy to master. Memory cards plug into the controller so players can tote game data from machine to machine.

Now, on to the whines.

Although Xbox uses DVD-ROMs as its game media, the machine can’t play DVD movies without a special remote control. Yup, it costs extra. Sure, most people want Xbox to play games, not watch movies. But it seems pretty tight to build functionality into a machine that can’t be accessed without spending an extra $30.

And who would build a game machine without a Reset button? Players who want to reset have to power down the system and start from scratch. Perhaps it’s just habit. Reset buttons have been part of set-top consoles for as long as anyone can remember. Microsoft is promising an era of gaming when consoles don’t crash. So maybe no reset button will turn out to be no big deal.

Time will tell. That’s really the bottom line for Xbox. The console has the chops to compete against Nintendo and Sony. A steady stream of great games will help. But as Sega learned with Dreamcast, even the best games in the business don’t guarantee success.

Nintendo GameCube: Nintendo knows games. With the demise this year of Sega as a hardware company, Nintendo is now the wise old man of video game consoles. The company thinks it can teach the upstarts a thing or two by focusing its GameCube console solely on games.

No music CDs. No DVD movies. No online capability. No hard drive. That bare-bones approach makes GameCube $100 cheaper than its competitors. Nintendo’s argument is that if no one is really going to use all that stuff just yet, why stuff it in and jack up the price?

Exactly. Purely as a game machine, GameCube gives players a sweet, fast ride. Honestly, GameCube does what it does so well that most people will never even notice the things it does not do.

The box is simplicity itself. A purple cube no bigger than a small purse, it boasts four controller ports on the front with two slots for memory cards. On top is a pop-up lid for the mini-discs that hold games. On the bottom are ports for future add-ons. Nintendo obviously plans to expand GameCube as the market demands.

The machine screams. The base processor is a modified PowerPC chip from IBM and the graphics system was designed in conjunction with ATI. Games such as “Wave Race Blue Storm” zip across the screen with crisp realism--so real, in fact, that water drops splash the screen as players cut across particularly choppy waves.

GameCube’s oomph becomes apparent in such games as “Rogue Leader: Rogue Squadron 2,” which puts players in the cockpit of various “Star Wars” fighters to combat the evil Empire. Some of the scenes look as if they are straight off the big screen.

GameCube’s big question is whether historically finicky Nintendo will keep up a fast enough pace of games to sate hungry gamers. Third-party developers already have promised a slate of good games, but the draw with Nintendo’s system has always been the company’s home-grown offerings.

Ergonomically, GameCube’s controller is a cramp waiting to happen--at least for grown-ups with bigger hands. It’s just too small and the buttons are clustered too close together. The layout of buttons, though, is novel. The main action button is bigger than the rest. Secondary buttons are arranged in a semicircle around the main. That makes it easy to hit and to move quickly to secondary functions.

Aside from that, GameCube is pretty close to perfect--for what it does. It’s a sweet no-frills game machine with a wholesome lineup of games waiting to put its impressive technical muscles through a workout.

Sony PlayStation 2: The oldest console on the market, PlayStation 2 has quietly overcome its early problems and blossomed into a solid platform that one day could become the nucleus of the living room. It’s the same price as Xbox, but it offers considerably less out-of-the-box horsepower. It has no hard drive or Internet connection, although Sony plans to launch those products as add-on peripherals soon.

Where PS2 excels is in its sizable library of games. Unlike competitors that aim to have a dozen or so titles on store shelves by the end of the year, PS2 already has more than 200--from action games and racers to more thoughtful adventures. Oddly enough, PS2 has evolved into the dependable Honda of video game machines: not overly exciting, but dependable and reliable.

PS2 can play DVD movies and audio CDs, although users will want to instantly upgrade to Sony’s $20 remote control and spare themselves the agony of trying to use the game controller to navigate.

Sony wisely built PS2 to play old PlayStation games, making it the first console to offer true “backward” compatibility. Of course, those old PlayStation games look pretty simple compared with the sharp stuff on PS2, but at least players don’t have to junk their old libraries.

The controller is built on the same tried and true design as the original PlayStation--a dog bone-like contraption with dual thumb sticks and a simple array of buttons. It’s comfortable enough and offers amazing flexibility in a variety of game environments. In addition, players can connect two PS2s for multi-player action on separate screens.

So which one to buy? It’s pretty tough to go wrong with any of these consoles.

Historically, the market has supported just two players. Through the 1980s and early 1990s, Sega and Nintendo ruled. Then Sony launched the original PlayStation. Sega quit the hardware business earlier this year after missteps with its Saturn and Dreamcast consoles.

That may be changing. Video games are huge business, with annual sales exceeding box office receipts. All three companies have committed hundreds of millions of dollars to support their consoles, and the odds of one falling off the face of the Earth any time soon are slim.

Players who know how they plan to use their consoles should be happy with whichever they buy.

Aaron Curtiss is editor of Tech Times. He can be reached at aaron .curtiss@latimes.com.

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The Skinny Microsoft Xbox

* Price: $300

* CPU: 733-MHz Intel chip

* Total memory: 64 MB

* Hard disk: 8 GB

* Video/audio playback: CD out of the box; DVD requires add-on remote

* Games by year-end: About 40

* The good: Top-tier games

* The bad: Big and clunky