The Battle Of Seattle

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Probably the most potent example of GameCube's capabilities is LucasArts' Rogue Squadron II. Replicating the climactic canyon-run sequence in Star Wars, designers created a Death Star that looked embarrassingly more realistic than the 1977 movie model. "I thought, 'My God, I hope Lucasfilm doesn't get mad at us,'" says director Brett Tosti. To save George Lucas' blushes, the virtual version has been fixed to look as plastic as the original.

Can Xbox match GameCube for visuals? You bet. If anything, it's even more cinematically realistic and detail obsessed. Just take a walk through the space station in Halo, an action game based on Larry Niven's classic sci-fi novel Ringworld, and you'll notice fingerprint marks on triple-glazed windows. Or check out Oddworld, one of the laugh-out-loud funniest video games in a long time. The scaly textured reflective skin on the alien heroes, Abe and Munch, is easily up to Jurassic Park standards.

Long before the current battle took shape, the two companies fought to win over independent game developers, who are critical to any platform's success. The key promise for any nascent game console is to make your machine easier to program than the other guy's--so developers can practically forget programming altogether and let their imagination run riot.

In 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 to Xbox in mid-development. "The Xbox is more like a BMW."

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.

This is part of Nintendo's bid to lose the kids-only label and grab a chunk of the elusive twentysomething market. "We're doing more to attract these audiences," admits Miyamoto. Not that the company is dissing its core tiny-tot gamers. Witness the Game Boy Advance, Nintendo's new handheld, which will serve a dual purpose as a controller for the GameCube.

But 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.