Xbox 360 Elite... Oh Is It??

As I'm sure you are aware, the gaming community was a'buzz last week following non-official confirmation of a 3rd SKU for the 360, dubbed the Xbox 360 Elite. Aside from being black and actually color-coordinating with the rest of your high-end home theater posse, this new, limited-run model features a 120 gigabyte hard drive and native HDMI support. Suggested retail price? 479 clams.

How does this new "1337" Box affect us as gamers? Hit that jump, fella, and read on.

The Elite could interest me less, as I only bought my Premium package last December and haven't a HDTV to care at all for HDMI. The larger hard drive is great. Naturally, who would be against having more storage space? For an extra $79, newcomers to the Xbox 360 family are getting a very sweet deal. We suckers who only have the old 20 gigger have the option of purchasing the larger drive for a "mere" $200 (or $199.99, most likely).

From a games standpoint, the 120GB drive is terribly unexciting. Unless you're heavily into the Video Marketplace or simply have to download every new demo upon release, the drive should do little to change your Xbox-ing experience. It's a matter of practicality, really. First off, we still do not have any way of copying our legitimately purchased games onto our 360 hard drives. We can't "install" any full retail games and are stuck with the old fashioned disc swapping methods of yore. So last gen, if you ask me. It drives me crazy to have to pop in my copy of Xbox Live Arcade Unplugged every time I want to play Geometry Wars. My 360 knows I have it, I've logged achievements for it, so why can't I download a 2nd copy for free and shelve that Unplugged disc for good? So this new 120GB drive, luxuriously spacious compared to the old 20GB one, is really going to be glorified storage for more Live Arcade titles and over-priced gamertag pictures.

Secondly, the adoption of the new hard drive by existing 360 Premium owners means there has to be a method of transferring all those valuable save games and software patches. There is supposedly a special cable included with the 120GB drive for just that purpose. That's fortunate, because this whole process is already getting too complicated for a simple, plug n' play game console. Like it or not, we are veering dangerously close into "PC tinkering" territory. Which brings me to my next point...

The announcement of the new, larger hard drive only highlights just how puny the 20GB drive is. Consumers and critics alike are very right to question why a larger hard drive wasn't bundled with the Premium package in the first place. I mean, when I brought home my virgin 360 back in December, I had only 10GB to spare due to all the demos and useless video trailers that were preloaded onto the drive. After clearing out the junk, I just barely cracked 12GB of free space. Appalling, really. You mean to tell me the Xbox 360 firmware and GUI takes up 8GB of disk space?

But you know what, even after downloading several demos, trailers, arcade games and creating many saved game files, I'm far from feeling any kind of pinch. So if I'm into games and games only, that sexy new hard drive is "nice to have" but hardly crucial.

If you're fallen in love with your 360 as a media center, however, then we have a slightly different story. The Video Marketplace, at least in the USA, is rapidly growing. Downloading a single high-definition movie would set you back a few gigabytes of storage space. So yes, that new hard drive does have a valid reason for being. For myself, however, I still don't plan to bite, what with the many other, ahem, "channels" that are available for securing video content. Hey, you didn't hear it from me...

Source: Engadget