From reading the article, it appears there was no "dustup." Everything went smoothly, and the ship was launched exactly as expected. ALL that happened was the wooden support beams shattered in a way that caused them to fly into people who were allowed to stand too close to it.

Who said anything about your controller being DEAD? I know I certainly didn't. And you know how much I've spent on AA batteries for my 360 over the last 8 years? About $20. I bought a kickass 15-minute charger and a set of batteries for it and I've been using them ever since. Batteries die while I'm gaming? Swap them…

Pretty sure I'll just settle into calling it Xbox, at least once it starts overtaking the 360.

Well, believe it. Because there are plenty of us who don't like built-in batteries across all sorts of devices, including phones. I gave some clear reasons why. Plugging in my controller to recharge, especially while playing, is rather ridiculous.

Sure. Just seems like more work than should be necessary in this day and age.

No, I was going DIRECTLY by their demonstrations. This isn't a faith thing, of "oh, Microsoft promised me they wouldn't beat me anymore," it was a case of them directly demoing new functionality of the Kinect that's an improvement over the previous generation. Don't assume motivations I haven't put forward.

Relieved to hear they're using AAs. That wasn't clear elsewhere. Leaves me free to get quality rechargeables that I can hot-swap instead of having to plug the controller into the system.

I prefer batteries I can hot-swap. I don't see why this is much of a problem for anyone. It's easy to get rechargeable batteries, and they'll probably make their own. Then BOTH of us can be happy instead of only you.

Because I don't want to have to plug my controller into the Xbox, having cables running into it all the time, and I want to be able to quickly switch them out when they're dying. I'm happy to hear this. I hated the way the PS3 handled it.

Yeah, that has nothing to do with what I wrote... brah. You're not a big fan of keeping a single train of conversation, are you?

I suspect that the number of people who had interference was small, and related to unusual speaker setups. This was hardly some massive screwup on Microsoft's part, and it's DEFINITELY not an indication of a failing with their CURRENT unveiling. At best it was a perfect example of the flaws with the older Kinect that…

Oh, I see, you're tying a bunch of stuff NOT discussed in this article together to inform your comment. It was hard to tell, since you didn't bother to say so.

I can't think of a single way in which it's like that, but okay...

They discussed all of that quite well, actually. It can sense when you're looking at it, it can remove noise, and has other tricks up its sleeve.

Seriously? Any links? I'm curious to see what asses they're making of themselves over a woman simply stating her own personal position and then being nice enough to grant the believers their position. I'm not surprised, but I'd like to see what they're saying to share with friends. This is nuts.

Microsoft's had their "cloud" in operation for well over a decade, and a ton of things are built off its backbone. They're well past the instability you're fearing.

Sounds logical. I suspect a major component of it will be the fact that sometimes you don't KNOW what an achievement is until the game's in the hands of the players. Maybe the players slowly find that a specific task is much, much harder than anyone ever expected. Or players start competing with one another to figure…

Please. She makes fun of my 360 for having a subscription. No way she's paying for Plus.

Not half as many as my girlfriend's PS3...

Exactly. So, as patranus set out so clearly for us, it's no big deal.