Word: xboxes
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...first week of September, Microsoft officials will watch proudly as the first batch of Xbox game machines begins rolling off seven 280-ft.-long assembly lines at a new industrial park outside Guadalajara, Mexico. There may not be any Frisbees flying around, but the 124 landscaped acres could be any Microsoft campus back in Washington State. There is a screening room larger than the local movie theater and a cafeteria that includes a steak grill and a sushi bar (lunch price: $3)--all crowned by a glass-and-stone headquarters. Inside Building 12, engineers are working to make sure that...
...real beauty of the Guadalajara plant--and the Xbox facility in Zalaegerszeg, Hungary--is that they are not owned by Microsoft. The Xbox is being made by Flextronics, a company that few consumers have heard of but that computer and telecommunications-equipment makers are eager to do business with. Indeed, near Building 12 are 16 production lines for Cisco Systems digital network routers. Other buildings produce Palm Pilots and DirecTV set-top boxes...
...both of these cases, however, the claim has turned out to be true. Developers say the standards and software in both GameCube and Xbox have chopped in half the time it takes to program a game--at least compared with the PlayStation 2, whose "emotion engine" system is so arcane that it has left a lot of developers badly burned. "PlayStation 2 is like a Maserati: looks great, but every time you take it in for an oil change, they have to take out the radiator," says Lorne Lanning, CEO of Oddworld Inhabitants, who led his Oddworld game from PlayStation...
Microsoft has the allegiance of more game-development companies--no surprise considering the software giant has been aggressively courting them for 18 months, even buying a couple along the way. That means Xbox will be launching with between 15 and 25 games. Nintendo, true to its code of silence, won't say how many outside developers are working on GameCube, but that it has any is significant. Previously, the company subsisted almost entirely on its own games. Now popular sports games like Electronic Arts' Madden NFL will be on the roster...
...once Pokemon playing gives way to bedtime, the plan goes, Dad will be able to put the Cowboys through their paces. Microsoft is coming at it the other way around: let Dad buy the Xbox in the first place, partly because he wants to play dvds on it (GameCube runs on 3-in. mini-CDs), and then buy a couple of cartoonish multiplayer games (like the Marioesque Fuzion Frenzy) for the kids...