Microsoft Takes Revised Chapter from Nintendo's Book

Hey, Herbert, have you heard about the new Xbox 360 announcement? I sure have, dear reader.  In case you haven’t, Microsoft is enhancing Xbox 360 Live with original Xbox games made available for download.  For 1200 “Microsoft Points” (sound familiar), according to Dailytech, which will retail for $15 USD – these games are dirt cheap.  There are just a few things I would like to bring up.

Firstly, I don’t think the Xbox 360 Arcade will be able to play such games as storage will be an issue (I will be guessing the games are at least several gigabytes) – in fact, the 20gb variant of the xbox 360 will probably only be able to hold a couple of games until its storage maxes out.  But hey, at least there’s still the option for it, right?  I also thought of what I would consider a feasible solution – if Microsoft had USB support, couldn’t they simply plug in an iPod and use it as an external hard drive and store the image there?  It might not load as quickly, but it’s the only thing I can think of so far.

Secondly, can Xbox Live really handle such a huge amount of traffic?  We’re talking about transferring thousands of gigabytes of data at a reasonable rate all over the world (mainly North America), which is no easy task.  Perhaps using Xbox 360′s like a P2P network uses computers might be a good idea here.

Last, and possibly the least of the worries, is the Nintendo fanboys jumping on this opportunity to ridicule Microsoft.  Think fanboys like me, except on a much larger scale – Microsoft’s practically taking this entire chapter out of Nintendo’s book!  Microsoft Points?  Downloading old games – which is actually a great idea, if they had it first?

Anyhow, it seems like Microsoft and Sony are taking everything from Nintendo’s book – first lowering their respective prices and now this.  Not that I have a problem with it – frankly, I love competition – because the consumers always win.  In fact, I might be able to afford a Wii AND a PS3, a feat that I would never have dreamed of had the original PS3 price still been so high.