J Allard's Xbox 360 dual-SKU chat transcript now online

[GetGamer News]

Last night, we noted that J Allard would be making a rare
open-forum appearance in one of Microsoft’s Community chat rooms today. Major Nelson chose questions for J from over a
thousand submitted on the buckling beta site, and J also took a few questions from the personal e-mails that he’d
received recently. The major also noted in the transcript posted afterwards that with so many similar questions, they
“chose the ones that [were] most representative of the majority of the questions.” And just so you know, I got knocked
off the chat room right before noon PT (something that happened to the major once as well), so all I could do was send
him my list of questions and hope for the best. What, I wondered, could we expect from our close-shaved friend?



After the chat was done, the major told me in response that J genuinely wants to hear feedback. Unfortunately, with
all the reported lag from the extreme number of people in attendance, it was impossible to get any more than two dozen
questions answered in the time that we had. Based on
the transcript provided, however, it’s
easy to tell what was and wasn’t covered today. Let’s just say that Media Center can stream standard and HD video to
the 360 (sorry, don’t know about the 2004 edition specifically), and that backwards-compatibility will require a hard
drive because Xbox 1 games tend to use one (an answer I hadn’t considered since I focused on the need to store large
emulation profiles). At any rate, J’s answers regarding HD-DVD, the hard drive, and the reasons behind the Core system
package were not all that revealing (as
expected).


On the other hand, 1up has posted a video of an
editor roundtable to consider the dual-SKU dilemma as well. They take ten minutes to cover the different angles of
the pricing and component issues pretty well, but all five editors decidedly take gamers’ positions on the matter, as
they all intend to buy 360s sooner or later — the “Console” version, of course — with three to four of them intending
to buy at launch). I suppose we should expect nothing less, but their back-and-forth just felt a bit more satisfying
than the one I vicariously bore witness to today. Not having to temper their opinions and speculation for PR and
marketing purposes probably helped. I wonder what’s really going on in J’s head these days.


[via Major Nelson]


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