Microsoft's Biggest Mistake With The 360 (excluding Rrod Issues)? Options

[rahulduggal]

Support for DivX

[Alex Atkin UK]

Im shocked people choose Media Formats over the D-Pad and lack of the HD.

Personally, it would be the lack of HD. After they made such a fuss about that being WHY the xbox was so cool, only to then remove it in the 360 (well make it "optional" but effectively no longer the benefit it had in the Xbox being mandatory.

Then theres the D-Pad, which was a poor excuse as the Xbox one was fine so why is the 360 one even worse than the DS or Gamecube ones which arent exactly stellar either but they do the job better.

[rolly poly]

Forget about the scratching issues, they are rare, what about the fact that half of the DVD rom drives fail to open when the console is vertical? I've flashed quite a few systems and nearly every one with a Samsung drive has opening issues. How was this not mentioned in the last thread or this one?

Seriously, I feel like i'm the only person to experience this in a huge way.

my brothers stock 360 and my modded 360 have samsung drives that only like to open when horizontal AND a disc is already in the drive... other wise it's luck getting it to open.

my choice was higher capacity disc drive, i don't think microsoft's mistake was offering the core system. the mistake was not allowing devs to require a hard drive...

take GTA4, not a casual gamer's game of choice. most people who would play GTA4 already have a hard drive or would buy one.

at the very least they should allow updates distributed via live to make full use of the hdd by caching data...

[Malumvolo]

I hate the external Hard drive, and its price!

When you are on a budget, its hard to decide between buying a core and an overpriced hard drive, or the extra expensive premium or elite

[nickman]

Lack of Harddrive in one SKU. They had it right the first time around.

[phenoptix]

I voted for the fee on xbox-live, although now I've thought about it. The most annoying thing is the lack of media support, I got quite excited about watching clips and fav shows through the xbox, but it all came to nothing!

[tabsaid]

Surprised Media formats is ahead. Transcode 360 works great for me. Also figured most people on this forum would have a XBMC setup. I went with optional HDD since it definetly limits developers and games suffer.

This post has been edited by tabsaid: Aug 9 2007, 02:54 PM

[lion_2]

I feel that not having a price drop last holiday season was a huge mistake. Microsoft was lucky they got Gears of War.

[halohack]

I think you should definately add the Samsung DVD Drive faulty opening mechanism to the list, or in the next poll. Not a lot of attention has been brought to this.

[Juganawt]

Optional HDD is the biggest problem for me.

I can understand the lack of DIVX on the machine - it'd be a PR nightmare and would effectively show Microsoft endorsing the pirated movie industry, and would be counter intuitive for their business partners / Xbox Video Marketplace etc.

I can even understand lack of internal HiDef solutions. It'd force the price up (which is killing Sony), and delay the machine at least 6 months..

.. but forcing developers to think of machines that do not have a hard drive causes multitudes of problems. Some games ignore it completely (Final Fantasy, Football Manager), and I see many more games in the future going the same route, especially if Microsoft dump the Core SKU.

All games would run smoother, be able to stream more, and generally give a more enjoyable experience if Microsoft commited to hard drives in all systems. Therefore, lack of integrated HDD in all SKUS was a HUGE mistake.

[Barnolde]

EASILY the tard pack. Why they would go backwards from a standard HDD is beyond me. Nothing is that stupid, except the RROD of course.

Launching in 2005 made it impossible to include a hi-def optical media.

I think by 2008, the tard pack will have gone the way of the dodo.

[Reaper527]

Some games ignore it completely (Final Fantasy, Football Manager),

ironically Final Fantasy is the only game that actually requires the harddrive. i do agree though that the harddrive should be a standard component. due to the fact that developers can't rely on it being there, it is nothing more then a big memory card unlike how it was on the xbox1.

divx/xvid/ogm would have been nice (and who knows what will happen in the future as MS has proven they can give more codecs at their leisure through live updates), but the hdd is definitely what i consider their biggest mistake to be.

I think by 2008, the tard pack will have gone the way of the dodo.

unfortunately, while i agree with that statement i think the damage is done and games will still be designed for the legacy users without harddrives

This post has been edited by Reaper527: Aug 14 2007, 04:01 PM

[M_A_C]

We need an "All of the above!" option.

[ISOmaniac29]

should have had a bubble for all of them :/ that is true

but the only other thing that bothers me besides the red ring

is probbly the fees for online play im sick of that

This post has been edited by ISOmaniac29: Aug 14 2007, 11:48 PM

[LeFugitive]

My vote = The noise the Xbox 360's make is totallyunbelievable!

Even my Dual Quad Core based PC with 8Gb DDR2's is quieter and thats with pretty standard cooling!

I love having it and impressed that M$ have built a worthy product that was WORTH paying for!
The build quality on the exterior is pritty good, but not the same case on the internals, especially with the low quality cooling system they have chosen.

I think if I KNEW how noisey it really was, I may not have bothered.

I use mine mainly within a THX Ultra 2 home cinema and on a 3 meter wide projected Sim2 projector.
I've spent alot time and money in my system, only to be let down by the noise the Xbox 360 makes.

Thankfully, it works well wirelessly, so I'm managed to work around it a little, but it's NOT the answer to hide it somewhere beyond sight, as it makes it difficult with such KooL games like Ravin Rabbids (top game) as the camera won't work on pritty ANY extenstion I've tried!

I would say a close second is the media support! Althought I'm loving the stacks of WMV HD's about, they stil glitch and also means alot converstion with software for other formats.

One thing I think is VERY sad which ALOT of people have ignored! The Xbox 360 can NOT reproduce or pass-through HD audio signals! Very sad and not in my good books for that!

If your not familiar, signals like Dolby HD or better DTS true will NOT play through the Xbox 360 as it should. M$ have chosen to downsample the audio, into Dobly Digital 5.1Ch and thats it!

Try running anything beyond that and it will just down sample it! It's a huge shame and impressed with surround within games (Crackdown, Call of Duty etc) but for movies (mainly audio) it sucks!

OK... so it makes up for it visually (impressive HD visual) but whats the point of great image and poor sound!

I saw a few adverts plastered around (whilst on my travels around our little rock we call earth), stating the Xbox 360 is an all-in-one entertainment system. True, but it's like those cheap nasty all-in-one DVD, VHS and TV's you get. Does the job, but definetly not great or even near Pro Home Cinema!

I'd be happy to pay an extra £100 GBP for a total silent Xbox 360... but thats just me I guess?!

PS . This is all based on the standard 20Gb Xbox 360 as I'm still wondering if the Elite is even worth the effort... very little difference I'm sure and why HDMi I have NO idea... VGA and DVi are SO much better!