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XBox (Games) Entertainment Games

J Allard Interviewed 233

Posted by Hemos from the interesting-answers dept.
malchus6 writes "J Allard, one of the Xbox honchos over at Microsoft, spent an hour in an online chat answering questions regarding the upcoming release of the 360 including some pointed questions having to do with the two different price points, no wi-fi inclusion, his opinion on HD-DVD and more..."
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J Allard Interviewed More

J Allard Interviewed

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  • Revisionism at MS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2005 @12:51PM (#13373107)
    J Allard (Expert):
    Q: Why even offer the core package, its seems quite useless
    A: great question! the thing to remember that while we designed a no compromises game system, a huge percentage of our customers are not like the folks in this chat room. recognize that more than 75% of the folks on xbox have not played halo. by introducing the core system we are sending a signal to the market that we are committed to this part of the market just like with the xbox 360 premium bundle that we are committed to you.

    J Allard (Expert):
    Q: Why even offer the core package, its seems quite useless
    A: the significance of this message can not be understated. many of the publishing and retail partners want our commitment to grow the market. and as you have heard from us in our press conferences and such we are very committed to growing the market.

    • Re:Revisionism at MS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by imstanny ( 722685 )
      So basically... the core package is not meant for gamers?

      Either way, I think tha core package is a good move on their part. Whoever buys it will still have to buy accessories for it if they want to use it (controllers, games, etc). In the end, they might end up making more off those people that buy the core packet than the premium.

    • Or in other words (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:09PM (#13373253)
      The thing to remember is that while we designed a no compromises game system, we made some compromises.

      I just find it funny that they keep talking about "growing the market" when they $300 verison comes up. Um... I thought that was what the original XBox did, by trying to into new areas for the video game market, what with the hard drive and built-in ethernet and other features traditionally associated with PC gaming. Making those things into peripherals now with the XBox 360 seems to be acknowleging that growing the market wasn't actually a good idea to begin with, and they should retreat from that and just stick to the things the un-growed, traditional console market does.

      How do you "grow the market" by releasing something totally indifferentiable from the PS3? Or does "grow the market" mean "try to steal Sony's market"?

      • Re:Or in other words (Score:3, Insightful)

        by SpryGuy ( 206254 )
        Or does "grow the market" mean "try to steal Sony's market"?

        Bingo.

      • but Frodo was on Mtv with crowds of people and they all looked pretty happy about the 360 so it can't be all that bad rite??

        Seriously, I was kind of excited about 360 because I always said I would wait for them to learn from their my_First_Console.exe mistakes then I'd buy in once they're a little more stable and embraced by the gaming community, but now with it going this whole Ultra-Fantabulous-Media-Robot direction, I smell too much Microsoft bundle madness to care. All the outrageous pricing troubles pr
    • That isn't revisionism, it looks more like he was further explaining the reason for having a 'consol + controller' release - i.e. to attract non-gamers who might be scared off by the $400 'full' system.

      Bashing on MS is fun, but come on.

      • Re:Revisionism at MS (Score:3, Interesting)

        by FLAGGR ( 800770 )
        He starts off saying they didn't make any compromises in the system, next question he's talking about how they amde compromises and that it wasn't designed for the hardcore gamer.

      • Re:Revisionism at MS (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @06:06PM (#13375395)
        It may be more than just fun, however. Some of it is actually deserved.

        For example, out of the box, the $300 model can't save games. It doesn't have a hard drive, and it doesn't have a memory card. Compared to the xbox 360, this is most definately not BetterThanLastTime. The gist of the interview seems to be that the xbox 360 is, oddly enough, not designed for gamers.

        Personally I think that every single person who buys the $300 package is going to realize they can't save, become annoyed, and purchase a memory card. If every single person is going to get annoyed and buy one, why not include one with the unit and save annoying customers?

        There are many such things that are wrong with the useless $300 package. It looks to me like Microsoft is ignoring gamers (Or at least giving gamers second-seat) in favour of targeting the (possibly) broader "home entertainment appliance" market. I think this will backfire, especially with the more recent news that the PS3's "high" price might be $299, underpricing Microsoft's only out-of-box-useful package.

        • Out of the box (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Namarrgon ( 105036 )
          How many consoles in the last decade were useful "out of the box", at least the basic package? How many included any save-game storage? Only one. Did every single PSX & PS2 purchaser realise they couldn't save & become annoyed? Did Sony solve the problem by including memory cards in the basic package?

          Look at it this way: no matter which console you buy, you're getting a great deal - a lot of expensive hardware at well under cost. Yes, the add-ons are too expensive, but it's still an excellent deal

    • Bah. His answers were better in this interview [weebls-stuff.com].

  • More readable format? (Score:5, Informative)

    by garcia ( 6573 ) * on Monday August 22, 2005 @12:54PM (#13373128)
    I tried to copy/paste this and reformat it a BIT so that it was slightly more readable than what it was on the linked website. Ugh.

    Why is there almost no proper capitalization? I mean, it's already damn near impossible to read but a five minute skim/correct session wouldn't have been too much to ask, would it?

    On to the article (slight edits for format, no other changes):

    ****

    Major Nelson (Moderator): We are just about to get started

    Major Nelson (Moderator): Welcome to today's chat. I am happy to have J join us for an hour to take your questions on the Xbox 360. Just to let you know, due to J's injury he does have someone typing for him, but all of the answers are directly from J himself. With that said...welcome J. Also, we already have over 1,000 questions...many of which are similar, so we'll chose the ones that are most representative of the majority of the questions.

    J Allard (Expert):

    A: we'll get going with the first question now....

    J Allard (Expert):
    Q: My question: Can Microsoft guarantee that the HDD will be fully uitilised when present or are we going to see long load times with a slow DVD unit as standard from most developers.

    A: just like last generation utilization of things like xbox live and the hard drive will be up to the game designers and just like last time we expect game developers to be excited by this. we have been in clear communication for more than a year that some scenarios will include a disconnected hard drive and it has not slowed them down

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: Mr. Expert, will the Xbox 360 games use the hard drive for game saves and caching like the original Xbox did?

    A: absolutely. we think game designers have all kinds of innovative ideas that the hard drive will be used for. use of the hard drive is not limited to game scenarios. like xbox 1 you will be able to do things like rip and store music and don't forget about live scenarios and all the downloadable content

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: Why is the hard drive so highly priced? A 20GB hard drive now a days goes for about 20-30... why $100? I believe this will deter alot of sales..

    A: the 20 gb hard drive is a 2.5 inch user servicable drive and is more expense than a pc "crack the box" drive. it's one of the reasons we pushed to create a compelling premium bundle.

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: Why is the hard drive so highly priced? A 20GB hard drive now a days goes for about 20-30... why $100? I believe this will deter alot of sales..

    A: one of the reasons that we designed a user removable hard drive is in direct response to the hard core gaming audience to make it easier to take game saves, game maps, soundtracks, etc. easily to their friends house or lan party. they also wanted the ability to upgrade to larger capacity drives. and if the drive is not present because someone in the house took it on the road, you still want to be able to use the console for movies, music or games.

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: will the loss of HDD mean that all games will be made without the HDD in mind, therefore effecting users of the premium pack?

    A: absolute not. consider this last generation where somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of game consoles had hard drives attached. this did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross platform games on xbox. this generation our first party team and our exclusive content developers are just as committed to using the hard drive and like we they demonstrated with this generation our third party cross platform developers are committed as well. games like splinter cell, madden, and tony hawk all demonstrated unique capabilities in hard drive configured systems.

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: Can we stream videos from our PCs?

    A: yes. if you have media center on those pcs. you will be able to stream standard and high definition video.

    J Allard (Expert):

    Q: Why even offer the core packa

    • Re:More readable format? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by scribblej ( 195445 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:31PM (#13373452)
      Q: will the loss of HDD mean that all games will be made without the HDD in mind, therefore effecting users of the premium pack?

      A: absolute not. consider this last generation where somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of game consoles had hard drives attached. this did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross platform games on xbox. this generation our first party team and our exclusive content developers are just as committed to using the hard drive and like we they demonstrated with this generation our third party cross platform developers are committed as well. games like splinter cell, madden, and tony hawk all demonstrated unique capabilities in hard drive configured systems.


      What an idiot... "20% of systems had hard drives" -- yeah, but 100% of XBOXES had hard drives, and 100% -- count them! 100% of the XBox games are able to use it for something, if only storing saved games.

      Compare this to the number of PS2 games that even have the OPTION to use a hard drive. He's trying to make it sound like the sometimes-absent HDD will be no problem. But it's a HUGE problem. There is yet to be ANY console with an optional hard drive that had more than one or two games support it.

      • I know that, you know that, I'm sure MS knows that. They seem to have some clever marketing reason for almost every decisions like this they make. Now the question is.. WHY?!

        My only guess is that they realize that the people who buy the core systems won't be hard-core gamers. These people will not be buying Halo 2 and such. Hopfully game developers will be wise enough to understand their market and make games that make significant use of the HD. Sadly I really don't see a market for non hardcore gamers buyi
      • XBox1 games had to function perfectly when the harddrive was full, so it couldn't be absolutely depended upon to be useful for streaming or storing. Hence, it's relative underutilization for a stock part in the XB1.

        As far as the devs are concerned, this isn't much of a change.

        It is, however, why there's this big push with the 360 to market it primarily for its usefulness outside of off-the-shelf games.

        They're trying to take a part that was a loss (financially) the last go-round and make it into a premium u
        • I think you are mistaken, they had to take into account when the E drive was full which game saves, etc, are stored on, but they had the X,Y, and Z partitions which are fully readable and writeable. Even if these partitions are full, it doesn't matter since it is swap space and the content can be erased.

          Let's just hope developers do a check for the hard drive so they can at least cache files to it so games load faster.

          Also, regarding load speed... why couldn't MS use a 16X DVD-rom instead of a 12X? I boug
      • this did not deter game developers from utilizing the hard drive both for exclusive games and cross platform games on xbox.

        A cross-platform game has a single codebase that supports both systems with a HDD and systems without. When a HDD is present, the game offers extra features - custom soundtracks, for example. Yes, the developer actually went the extra distance to offer more features to make his game more attractive, because the market was big enough.

        Now, if 95% of customers buy the Core system with

    • Re:More readable format? (Score:5, Funny)

      by MarkGriz ( 520778 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:39PM (#13373527)
      "Why is there almost no proper capitalization? I mean, it's already damn near impossible to read but a five minute skim/correct session wouldn't have been too much to ask, would it?"

      You must have missed the last question from the interview....

      Q: Many gamers and non-gamers alike choose to communicate with the generally accepted practice of capitalizing the first character of each sentence. Does Microsoft restrict your usage of the Shift key, or is there some other reason?

      A: Great question. The fact of the matter is that I'm typing this on the Microsoft "core" keyboard, which does not include a Shift key. Our market research indicates nearly 75% of our target market prefers to be lazy and not use a shift key. While our "premium" keyboard does offer this advanced technology, one was not available at the time of this interview.
      • I was expecting something along the lines of:

        A: microsoft will have a shift key available in the premium bundle keyboard. this isn't just a 'crack the box' keyboard. this is a removable, user servceable keyboard with some really compelling shift key features, for only a hundred extra dollars.
    • A: great question! the thing to remember that while we designed a no compromises game system, a huge percentage of our customers are not like the folks in this chat room. recognize that more than 75% of the folks on xbox have not played halo. by introducing the core system we are sending a signal to the market that we are committed to this part of the market just like with the xbox 360 premium bundle that we are committed to you

      Yay bullshit, here we come! They sold enough copies of Halo so that 25% of all

  • Public relations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2005 @12:55PM (#13373136)
    If you are interested in the XBox 360, the information in this interview could be extremely useful to you. However, whether you're interested or not, make absolutely certain not to forget this crucial fact while reading this article:

    You are reading an advertisement.
    • Where exactly would objective information about an unreleased product be found?

      I don't mind READING advertisements, I see somewhere along the lines of 10,000 or more a day...one more ,one less..
    • You are reading an advertisement.

      No way. Get outta town.

      Really? An advertisement?

      Damn. Who'da thunk it. Right there on the internets and everything. Wow.

  • Backwards compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)

    by ChronoDK ( 710523 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:03PM (#13373202)
    He forgot to ask the most important question - the only thing there is left to know about Xbox 360 - which first generation Xbox games will we be able to play? We know it's not all of them, but not how many or how few.
    • We at least know you won't be able to play any XBox 1 games on the $300 version. XBox backward compatibility requires the hard drive. [nwsource.com]
    • He forgot to ask the most important question - the only thing there is left to know about Xbox 360 - which first generation Xbox games will we be able to play? We know it's not all of them, but not how many or how few.

      From the article:
      J Allard (Expert): Another one from mail: What about backward compatibility in the core system?
      J Allard (Expert): because we didn't abstract storage in the first generation xbox back compat will require a hard drive. the good news is that the core system owners can upgra

    • As I understand it, it's not a matter of whether you will be "allowed" or "forbidden" to play a particular game. The 360 will come with an emulator that attempts to run Xbox 1 games. Microsoft will only guarantee (read: put QA resources towards) making it work with certain top-selling games, you're free to try whichever games you want and maybe they'll work if they don't do anything too crazy.
      • You understand incorrectly. Due to the differences between the two consoles, any Xbox 1 game will require an emulation profile. If the profile is not available (they can be downloaded from Xbox Live as they become available), the game simply will not run. They'll start off with the most popular stuff, and work backwards (to a point) from there.

  • Haha (Score:2)

    by FLAGGR ( 800770 )
    What does he say is the successor to cd audio? Napster, iPod and MSN Music. Wait, he spelt iTunes wrong. Does anyone actually use MSN Music?

    Ignoring that, cd sales haven't dipped AFAIK, I sure as hell still buy them. I like having the cd covers. the case, the whole "physical" cd. I use p2p to find music I like, and if there's only one song on the album I like, I keep it (not like I'd buy the album anyway)

    MSN Music the successor to cd audio? My ass. If he had've said iTunes that would've made slightly more

  • An Hour? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Red Flayer ( 890720 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:05PM (#13373217) Journal
    This interview took an hour to complete?

    Some marketing mumbo-jumbo bs, and then a summary that says absolutely nothing other than "We want to make the best console ever for everyone." Which was probably written prior to the interview, then cut-and-pasted into the chat session. br>
    If I am going to spend time viewing an online interview with an "expert," I expect to gain some insight, maybe, possibly, learn some new things. The MS press releases on the XBox 360 would have been a more informative read... and would, in essence, say exactly the same thing.

    I know I'm getting modded down for this, but really now...

    One valid item-of-note:

    FTA: "Q: Why even offer the core package, its seems quite useless[sic] A: the significance of this message can not be understated. many of the publishing and retail partners want our commitment to grow the market. and as you have heard from us in our press conferences and such we are very committed to growing the market."

    Translation: We have to convince developers and retailers that consumers will purchase the product, which they assuredly will not do at the price point for the complete system.

    • Re:An Hour? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Morgon ( 27979 )
      It took an hour, because they were having tons of bandwidth/technical trouble, and J Allard had a (horrible) transcriptionist, since he was recently in an accident.

  • Confusion (Score:5, Insightful)

    by keyrat rafa ( 856668 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:06PM (#13373222) Homepage
    My friends aren't hard core gamers. They don't look up specs or read online chats. They'll probably buy the cheaper xbox only to find out later it's missing functionality (no backwards compatability, as well as other features). This is just a muck on MS's part. And a 2.5" drive? Why the hell would they go and do that? Just to make it more expensive? I'm waiting for the PS3. Hopefully it takes a normal 3.5" IDE drive just like the PS2 does.

    • Re:Confusion (Score:2, Interesting)

      by WillAffleckUW ( 858324 )
      My friends aren't hard core gamers. They don't look up specs or read online chats

      Well, some of my son's friend are hard-core gamers, and they're severely underwhelmed. My son went down to the Game Testing Expo in Seattle's Pacific Science Center this Saturday, hoping to see something from the xBox 360 or PS3 or Nintendo Revolution, but there wasn't anything there except mist (vapor is too strong a word). So he and all his teen friends seem to be leaning towards planning on buying the Nintendo Revolution

    • Re:Confusion (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Gruneun ( 261463 )
      And a 2.5" drive? Why the hell would they go and do that?

      Take a look at a picture of the drive [xbox.com].

      It's tiny and built to be mobile. I'm willing to bet that it's almost no time before the mp3 add-on hardware is released. At that point, thousands of people already have the device and the upgrade would be a fraction of the cost against a new iPod. They would be stupid not to do it.
    • The drive will be removable. One of the selling points is a removeable drive you can take your saved games and such with you to your friends house. Do you really think most people would be comfortable lugging a 3.5 with its casing around. A small light notebook style drive would be much more consumer friendly in this regard.
    • -- And a 2.5" drive? Why the hell would they go and do that? Just to make it more expensive?

      Or to make it smaller. A smaller drive takes up less overall space so it allows them to decrease the overall size of the unit

  • Not a sales pitch for them, but... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cerdic ( 904049 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:06PM (#13373227)
    For $100 more, you get:
    -remote control (for playing movies)
    -wireless version of controller
    -Xbox Live headset and 'silver' membership
    -20GB hard drive (needed to play some Xbox1 games)
    -High definition AV cables

    If you don't get that more expensive package, you *have* to spend at least another $25 for a memory card to save games. For the Xbox1, you absolutely needed the $25-$30 remote to play DVD movies. I suspect that the Xbox360 will require this.

    If you didn't care about high def cables, Xbox Live, or features that need a hard drive, then you have saved $50 at this point. This seems more like a scam to rip people off than really offer them a cheaper package.

    • Re:Not a sales pitch for them, but... (Score:5, Informative)

      by FLAGGR ( 800770 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:11PM (#13373272)
      The DVD remote was just a way to make sure Sony didn't get money off of every xbox sold. Sony and some other companies get royalties off every dvd capable device, so MS made it an addon (even though the system was still technically capable of playing dvd's, since it didn't have the remote it wouldn't, so no money for Sony) this way people that wanted the feature would get the addon, and 10$ or whatever would go towards Sony from the remote's price. That's why the playstation line has dvd out of the box. Stupid Sony/other evil media companies. Same thing for the x360 I bet, and same thing for the Nintendo Revolution (as confirmed by Iwata)
    • Do people not understand retail markup? That's $100 more RETAIL. The store and distributors are going to snarf half that. So all those posts who say that those parts are overpriced by $50 need to understand that those extra dollars are not going to MS. Not to mention that there's more to a product than wholesale component costs.
      • People who are accustomed to building their computers from OEM parts don't understand retail markup, and for them, there isn't anything more to a product than wholesale component costs. (building computers is fun, not work) For this crowd, the Xbox 360 is competing with computer upgrades, and given the caliber of people on Xbox Live, the computer crowd might even be a nicer environment.

  • USB storage? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:07PM (#13373234)
    J Allard (Expert):
    Q: Can a USB Memory been used by the xbox 360??(I'm asking this because the 360 has USB ports)
    A: at present our design for xbox 360 uses the usb ports in a read-only capacity for playing music and viewing photos. if there are other applications that you guys think are interesting then please give us your feedback.


    This is such a weak answer.

    Here's an interesting application, Mr. Allard: How about not screwing customers by forcing them to buy some undersized, overpriced "XBox360 Memory Unit", instead of allowing the use of USB flash drives for game saves?
    • Because then it's that much easier to hack. A proprietary memory storage unit would be a good amount more difficult, I'd imagine. You can bet that 2.5" removable drive will be significantly encased and modified also.

    • Re:USB storage? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Mongoose ( 8480 )
      I have your answer right here: D-R-M.

      They don't want people to be able to alter or control anything like saved games, media, etc. In fact they want you to buy a media pc to use with Xbox 360 -- runing Windows Media Center of course!

      It's just standard practice. =)

    • You know how some people always talk about having a preference for gaming on their Xbox/PS2/etc because it "just works"? One of the things that helps is having a fixed install base. One type of harddrive, one type of memory unit, one type of video card. As soon as they allow any old device to be used, they have to support a variety of options.

      Plus they lose control.

      If you want to have a gaming machine that allows you to tinker with every component, keep your PC.
  • This link was already part of the article here http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/22/ 0615249&tid=211 [slashdot.org] Why it becomes another article is anyones guess.
  • No thanks.

    I only read duplicate stories. If it's not good enough to be green-lighted four or five times in a month, it's simply not worth reading.

  • Games? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by LBt1st ( 709520 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:29PM (#13373438)
    I still haven't seen a reason to buy this thing. Where are the games??? Who cares about streaming video, mp3's and cameras? That's what PC's are for. Hell they even say you need a media PC to even use the feature. If you got that already, what's the point? I still haven't seen any games and it's like 2 months from launch. -Kevin
    • How is this insightful? Some asshat can't find the lists of launch date games, posts about it and gets moderated well? Good lord.

    • Re:Games? (Score:3, Informative)

      by radish ( 98371 )
      It's not really hard to find a list of games for the 360, but here's a few of the one's I'm interested in just to save you the google:

      PGR3
      Perfect Dark Zero
      Ridge Racer 6

      Gears of War and Quake 4 are also big ones coming up, not yet sure if they will be launch titles.

    • Re:Games? (Score:3, Informative)

      by ChatHuant ( 801522 )
      I still haven't seen any games and it's like 2 months from launch.

      Here [ign.com]'s a list; here [joystiq.com]'s another; yet another here [gmr-source.com]. Finding them took all of 20 seconds on Google.

  • And the real reason... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FatherOfONe ( 515801 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:30PM (#13373448)
    "What is your opinion on HD-DVD?

    A: it's going to be interesting to see how and if a high def format for movies plays out. when we designed the the initial xbox many people asked if sacd or dvd audio would be the successor to the cd format for music. as everyone knows the real successor was mp3 and digital distribution with things like napster ipod and msn music. while there is a lot of talk about this in the industry it will be interesting to see what the exact future of this is for movies. of course i think there will be a need for higher capacity optical media for storage applications. we prefer hd-dvd to blu-ray in terms of the flexibility it offers to different applications as well as the infrastructure costs to the market."

    The real answer...
    Well we hate Blue-Ray because it is what Sony picked and we are going to do everything we can to piss all over it. We realize that by not providing HD-DVD by default it will give the Playstation 3 a significant advantage in game content and as such we need to tell all the Xbox faithfull that it really isn't that important.

    The real question that should have been asked.

    How few XBOX 360's need to be sold this year (shipped to customers not stores), before you consider it to be a failure?

    • Well we hate Blue-Ray because it is what Sony picked and we are going to do everything we can to piss all over it.

      Or, if you have a clue:

      We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents.

      There's no clear indication that Blu-ray will give Sony a "significant advantage" as you claim. Yes, Blu-ray has more storage, but it's not clear that any game is going to make use of anywhere close to even HD-DVD's "mere" 20GB+ storage capabilities in the
      • "We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents."

        Wrong. Look at Microsoft's past as an example. My point stands. "If" the roles were reversed, you would see Microsoft telling EVERYONE why they needed HD-DVD. Much like they mentioned ALL the advantages like a HD in the XBOX vs the PS2. I do have to laugh now that they have done a 180, and won't include one in this new version.

        Blue Ray in the PS3 will do two things. One is that it wil
      • Or, if you have a clue:

        We aren't choosing Blu-ray because we don't particularly like the idea of paying our lead competition royalty patents.

        There's no clear indication that Blu-ray will give Sony a "significant advantage" as you claim. Yes, Blu-ray has more storage, but it's not clear that any game is going to make use of anywhere close to even HD-DVD's "mere" 20GB+ storage capabilities in the near future.

        If you remember back when the PS2 was originally released much of your arguments against Blu-ray were
    • I have no idea why people think that having a 50GB Bluray will have any benefit over 9 GB DVD for games. Warcraft 3 was released on one CD including movies. Doom 3 for all its faults, has a very impressive graphics is only 1.5GB. I am not a hardcore gamer, but I am unaware of any game that takes up more than 1 DVD, and I cannot imagine game content needing more than that in the next five years (Quake 3 was released about 6 years ago, and was about 500MB, Doom 3 was released this year (or so) and is three ti
  • Another question he didn't answer: If the 360 ever ships with a next-generation DVD player, will it output 1080i over component cables? Or do we all still need to keep waiting for a player that will work with early adopter equipment?

  • Oh. shit. (Score:2, Funny)

    by d2_m_viant ( 811261 )
    as everyone knows the real successor was mp3 and digital distribution with things like napster ipod and msn music

    Oh shit. He said iPod. 20 bucks says there two guys in black suits staring at him when he turns around from that computer screen. Somebody didn't get the memo from Bill G that says "we don't speak of such evils."

  • Article Slow, Transcript here (Score:5, Funny)

    by hobotron ( 891379 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @01:52PM (#13373638)


    pS34lyfe: lol ur xbox doesnt have 200 mil textapixel fill rate lol
    pS34lyfe: cell is cyberdyne look at the screen sh0ts
    AllardJ: what
    g4m3Cubist: u know u can get liek 2 rev for one xbox360 so is that like 2 rpm? lololz
    satUrnSleeper: SATURN WILL RETURN AND TRIUMPH
    pS34lyfe: sum1 +b that s3g4 n00b
    g4m3Cubist: jus +b *@aol.com lmaosedong
    PeeCeeG4m3r: why is the cs:s serber down
    d0nK1nG: CLOCKSPIDER VS LIMECAT DEATHMATCH AT 8PM CST
    rEvOlUtIoN06: so uh why are u talkin bout ur console every1 knows ur just apossed to be quiet like nintendo
    AllardJ: Oh Jesus Christ why did I agree to this

  • A much better interview can also be seen here [weebls-stuff.com].

  • I may have read it differently... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Winterblink ( 575267 ) on Monday August 22, 2005 @02:08PM (#13373736) Homepage
    I just added "... so we will make more money" to the end of every sentence.
    • It's that sort of capitalist mentality that gets money just flowing into the shareholders pockets. What in God's name were they thinking?!!
  • Word to the wise. . .

    Stay away from these things, kids.

    Ascending takes a fully charged and properly functioning mind, and these boxes exist to make sure you never reach such a state.


    -FL

  • Is it backwards compatible? Apparently not the core version.

    J Allard (Expert): Another one from mail: What about backward compatibility in the core system?
    J Allard (Expert): because we didn't abstract storage in the first generation xbox back compat will require a hard drive.

    It sounded like they designed the "core" version for casual gamers. Well it's the casual gamers who want to play their older games. This was a strange decision indeed. The "core" PS3 will be backwards compatible. The "core" Rev
    • It sounded like they designed the "core" version for casual gamers. Well it's the casual gamers who want to play their older games.

      (1) The newer version of the XBox APIs abstracts the storage, the older version didn't. You therefore need a hard drive to property run the older games.

      (2) Someone in another department (marketing or product management) designed the different market deployments of the system. Since they now had the freedom to vary the storage level on the system, it was an obvious decision to

  • Five Years (Score:4, Informative)

    by FriedTurkey ( 761642 ) * on Monday August 22, 2005 @04:47PM (#13374877)
    another possibility is that 5 years from now that you want more storage on the box or on the network and be able to take advantage of that

    Who cares?? In 5 years Microsoft will replace the Xbox 360 and only certain games will be compatible.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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