J Allard speaks in internet chat. Says very little

Yesterday evening saw approximately 1500 gamers gather in a chat room set up by Microsoft in order for J Allard to clear up some issues that have been bothering people since the Xbox 360 price announcement. While the chat was open, with anyone free to submit questions, any real questions were ignored, with J and his typist (he can’t type due to his recent injury) choosing to answer questions whose answers are probably already available on a FAQ somewhere on the Xbox website.

Even so, a number of questions are worth reporting on as they do clear things up a little.

“Q: Will developers utilize the hard drive when one is detected, or will most games be made without using it at all? Will the HD speed up load times?

J Allard: speeding up load times is one of the many things a hard drive can be used for but really it is up to the imagination of the developer. We have been talking with game developers for a while now to make sure that games will load efficiently without a hard drive present. In terms of load times, as a gamer I am super sensitive to how frustrating load times can be which is one of the reasons we put in a dual layer 12x DVD in the system to make sure gamers get great performance with or without a hard drive. One of the challenges with new optical formats when they first come out is the performance of the media which was a consideration when we decided what the optical format for Xbox 360 would be.”

“Q: Can a USB Memory been used by the Xbox 360?

J Allard: 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.”

“Q: Why doesn’t WiFi work out of the box?

J Allard: We worked with game designers and talked to hard core gamers and asked them what their top priorities were and the bulk of our investment went into the silicon to the CPU and the GPU so we would have kick *** games. We had a fixed budget and could not do it all. In the end we had a budget and had to offer WiFi as an option but we did decide to add “a” as a standard in addition to b and g. We are also compatible with existing devices already on the market.”

While not exactly addressing the concerns of the entire gamine population, at least J managed to make a few points. Most importantly, he believes that developers will use the Xbox 360 hard drive, USB memory sticks can’t be used to save data and WiFi wasn’t included in the machine due to hardware costs – fair enough considering it isn’t something every user will use. The hard drive issue is still something that concerns a lot of people, and probably will do until games are seen that prove what the hard drive-less system can do.

The chat itself was a bit of a disaster with the chat room swamped with people eager to see what J had to say, forcing many people out of the room due to lag. Microsoft should probably be congratulated for attempting what they did; unfortunately they didn’t really pull it off successfully.