Chat with J Allard

[scooby_dooby]

Will a faster have any worthwhile benefit though, worth the extra money? On a PC the HD's being thrashed all the time, but as the XB360 seems mostly for saves and media a faster disk sounds like it might be overkill for the purpose.

Probably not. Only on the HDD-Only games that come out like MMO's, these will benefit from faster transfer speeds for sure.

Also, oblivion is urging people to get the HDD, saying the game uses it extensively and will play much "smoother" with the HDD, so we already have an example of a game using the HDD extensively although not "requiring" it.

 

[scooby_dooby]

lol, I was just checkin out the specs on tyhe LD25, it is only a 5400rpm drive, 2MB of cache.

This was funny though, check out the official image that Seagate had on their site for the LD25:

 

[J_Saint]

It supports PSOne?

 

[BlueTsunami]

lol, I was just checkin out the specs on tyhe LD25, it is only a 5400rpm drive, 2MB of cache.

This was funny though, check out the official image that Seagate had on their site for the LD25:

LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They could have atleast shown a PS2 controller......

 

[Sis]

Did you know Forza remebers every tire track ever left on every track throughout your career? Courses start off clean, and after a few months are completely marked up from your own turns and braking, now in my opinion that's cool! Mercenaries has huge environments that stretch for kilometres, and remembers every blown up building, statue, wall etc in the entire city. There are many games that have persistent worlds on XBOX, it's something I've become used to and was hoping would become a standard in the future.

It is definitely cool. But in my mind, the onus is on you to show that the hard drive makes this possible.

Certainly you can argue that the hard drive allows more room for save game data--but the game still must load it from the hard drive. So, to prove that a 64MB card won't be more than enough, I need the following information:

1) The tire marks took up 10s of megs of data to persist.
2) Forza streamed this information off the hard drive during game play. (Meaning, it was not loaded from the save file at the start of the track).

Otherwise, I have to argue that the 64MB card is more than enough to allow Forza to work as before.

.Sis

 

[scooby_dooby]

Forza seems to take up aproxx. 550MB in one of my cache directories so it seems to be using it.

However, the skidmarks file is only ~1MB so it wasn't a good example and I agree it could definately be done on a MC.

- edit: i just remembered that last gen memory cards were only 8mb, that means that 1/8th of the card would have to be dedicated to simply tiremarks, that's not practical. So even at 1mb it's still too large for a memory card last gen, it's possible but not realistic.

 

[jpr27]

there is no bait and switch when everything they promised is in the box.

People talked themselves into it being $299 ( i was expecting/hoping too) when it was never said that it would all come in the box at that price. It was first *officially* announced at $399 with all of the things they said it would have.

now if I go to the store and pay $399 and the box doesn't have everything they said it will and instead say I need to pay more to get it, then it is bait and switch.

Also, you do not need the HDD to play on Live (just a memory card)"Quote/

Actually I do see one. If you were one of the ones who preordered the system (before this announcement) Most gamestores were advised that there were NO signs of the XB 360 coming without a HD. jvd could probably give more insight to what they were told to MS at the time when preorders were first started. My local gamestore manager said MS gave the impretion in their information that it would indeed include one. When you look back at all interviews and information whether MS, Developers, E3 Etc. as you said (you were expecting/hoping too) that it would indeed come with the HD and even a wireless controller. WHen you take a look overall information put out by MS, I cant see how you can come to the conclusion that we were simply mislead bait and switch whatever. The humdinger of course being that the HD would not be required to play XB 360 games.

This has nothing to do with pricing. I agree the Xbox 360 $399 deal is great but I think MS decision was poor and has made it very difficult for some of the xbox fans.

 

[jvd]

there is no bait and switch when everything they promised is in the box.

Please xbox 360 costs 300$ with no hardrive even though they said the hardrive was standard .

They can play the game where they call it the core system and then xbox 360 is the premium. However once they put xbox 360 on the box it breaks thier word that it comes stnadard . Because it will allways be xbox 360 core . No matter what they watn to call it .

 

[Tap In]

Please xbox 360 costs 300$ with no hardrive even though they said the hardrive was standard .

They can play the game where they call it the core system and then xbox 360 is the premium. However once they put xbox 360 on the box it breaks thier word that it comes stnadard . Because it will allways be xbox 360 core . No matter what they watn to call it .

I understand what they did with the HDD jvd.

They never, however, announced a price for that system with a HDD until last week. $399.

all the other speculation of a $299 rig with all that gear was S P E C U L A T I O N.

therefore, no bait and switch.

I can see how some might interpret it that way, but me, I just don't see it. heh

 

[_leech_]

You see, there'd be no bait-and-switch problem is they just had the $399 version only. Simple.

 

[Acert93]

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 (read: hard core gamers). 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.

I was skimming the news and found this:

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/08/26/news_6132031.html
[quote="GameSpot]To call the Halo series popular is an understatement. The original game has sold more than 13.8 million copies, while Halo 2 raked in more than $125 million in first-day sales alone. According to Microsoft's figures, there are 2 million subscribers to the Xbox Live service who have combined for 387 million hours of Halo 2 over the network since its release last November. That works out to a staggering average of almost 194 hours spent online playing Halo 2 for each Xbox Live subscriber, whether he or she owns Halo 2 or not.[/quote]

Now that may include PC sales, but that still does not make sense.

20M Xbox units sold
25% of Xbox units = 5M Xbox units

13.8M Halo units sold
If 5M people bought Halo 1, that means the PC version of Halo sold 8.8M copies. That did not happen.

Allard may mean people who have played Xbox, but even then that is hard to believe. The first game I played on Xbox (which I don't own) is Halo. Every time I see my friends with an Xbox and we play it is Halo. While this is anecdotal, I know a lot of others with similar experiences.

MOST of Allards reasons are really good and accurate IMO. But the 25% Halo number is way off it seems.