Would you like to buy a new car? Let’s just imagine that you would like to buy a car, a brand new one. The car comes with electric windows, sunroof, alloy wheels, air conditioning, carpet mats, metallic paint and colour coded bumpers all included in the price. But wait a minute, you don’t want alloy wheels? No problem, the price of the car will be reduced by £600. What’s that? You don’t want the air con either? No problem we’ll reduce the cost of the car by a further £300. This can continue until you have a basic car but at a fraction of the cost. In the current economic climate it sounds like the ideal way to go, get rid of all the stuff you don’t want and pay a fraction of the cost. Hell, you can now even trade in your old car, within certain limits, and receive £2,000 off the price of a new car.
It is fairly obvious where I am going to go with this but let me interject a little first. This is not about PC gamers, this is about us console dwellers, so you don’t need to tell me about all the wonders of PC gaming and its ability to modify! So, if you can buy a car – or even a house – tailored to your own wants/needs, why can’t the same be done with the gaming consoles you play on? It’s not like it hasn’t already happened in a way, you can get various different models of the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 but all that really differs with these machines is memory. Ah memory! That enigma that we have always had to pay more for, you want more memory? Well you’re gonna need a bigger wallet. Did you know that there is a new Nokia phone due out, the N97 I think it is, which has nearly 80 GB of on board memory? Try shoving a 360 HDD of that size in your pocket! Sorry, off again! Right here are my suggestions for refining the whole console experience to fit any wallet, pay attention Sony and Microsoft… what the hell, Nintendo too.
Here is the scenario: I want to buy a new Xbox 360 but I don’t need it right away, I visit a website or shop and have several choices in front of me. As a standard I will use the Elite model, with HDMI, 120 GB HDD, USB ports, etc. I am aware that the arcade model of the 360 is the cheapest option, but lets just make it that there is only one version available that can be customised to suit. The best price I can see just now is about £220, sounds okay but I don’t want to pay that. I now enter a series of options all there to bring down the cost of my console and also to personalise it. The options could be as follows:
- Do you wish to be able to burn CDs to the HDD?
- Do you want to watch DVDs?
- Do you wish to access the marketplace?
- Do you need a wireless controller?
- Do you need an HDMI output?
- Do you need more than one USB port?
These all may sound like pretty essential things and I’m sure that there are a great many of you that couldn’t do without them. However, if you are gaming on a budget, this could be an affordable way to keep on gaming. Just imagine if you could pick up a bare bones Xbox 360 for under £100, it would be very tempting. Take away all the bells and whistles, it could all be done really easily and you are left with something that we haven’t seen in a great many years… a dedicated games playing machine.
All too often in the current gaming generation we are told that our machines need to be multimedia devices. We need to access the net, we need to be able to watch DVD or Blu Ray, we need to be wireless, we need motion sensing controllers. Truth be told, we don’t need that! We just think that we do because it has been fed to us so much. All of the modern consoles would function just as well as normal machines that just play games, we only think that with less features that they would be worse. In the face of a collapsing global economy we should all be seeking cheaper ways to keep gaming alive and available to the masses. My only other suggestion is to become an MP and claim it all on expenses!
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