'Xbox Live Starter Pack,' Refurb HDDs Bolster Arcade Model
As a specs-snob, who'd rather eat sawdust for a month than save money on a less-than-ultimate piece of hardware, I've always looked askance at the Xbox 360 Arcade model, or the differently-branded HDD-lacking SKUs of the past. After all, what's an Xbox without XBLA? Now, that's a rhetorical question - of course it still plays great games. But the experience is ablated at the very least; you need a hard drive to really build and enjoy a library of XBLA games, which is of course a big component of what Xbox is all about.
Luckily, Microsoft is addressing that issue on two fronts. The first, a $99 "Xbox Live Starter Pack" lets Arcade owners "correct" their silly frugality: the bundle includes a 60GB HDD, headset, ethernet cable and three-month gold subscription. It doesn't end up saving you a big chunk of cash, of course, but it provides peace of mind for folks who don't know up-front whether or not they'll enjoy taking full advantage of the Xbox Live's downloadable features.
But for true penny pinchers, Microsoft is offering refurbished hard drives for only $19.99. How's that for flexibility? Kudos to Microsoft for helping to make the Arcade model more of a viable alternative to the pwecious, pwecious Elite.
New U.S., European Xbox Hardware Bundles Revealed [Gamasutra]
tiny dancer
Posted to Hot Stuff, Miscellany on 29 October 2008
· Comments (1)
Other stuff like this: arcade, hdd, microsoft, xbox 360, xbox live starter pack
So it's better now to just get the arcade and then the upgrade, because the Pro model, with all of that, comes with just ONE MONTH of X-Box Live gold, and the starter kit comes with 3.