Man oh man oh man... and I thought console industry people were already notorious for overhyping and then somehow trying to keep a smile on their faces while admitting they came up short. Granted, X-Box will still be a powerful system without a doubt but between their apparent absolute Dreamcast rip-off controller and now their initial specs shrinking faster than my dinky hopping in a cold pool you gotta hand it to Gate$ and Co. for making some poor impressions on their first go at this.

Of course for Nintendo fans no need to begin breaking out the champagne, no matter what the specs or aesthetics or what have you this is going to be a tough battle from all fronts... but you gotta love choice quotes from reps trying to dodge a tough question like with this one:

IGN Xbox: Last year Seamus Blackley was quoted as saying in an interview with us that "The only changes that you'd ever possibly see -- and I think that the probability of there being any changes is extraordinarily low -- would be upgrades to system performance." What happened?

Allard: honest truth is that the goal that we always had for the system was 3x the graphical and computational performance of PlayStation 2. Initially, we thought that a 600MHz CPU and a 300MHz GPU was about right -- and that was in March. Now that Nvidia's got the NV20 in production, and we've got NV20 cards working with the operating system out in dev kits, and we've got games up and running on NV20s, we learned a bit more about the production and the manufacturing, and we decided that the 250MHz combined with the 733MHz is really the right balance. We'll still hit the 3x, but we guessed bad with the 300Mhz.

Spin and question avoidance are wonderful things, be sure not to miss the rest of the interview.