Xbox 360 Arcade/Core Hate

[Final-Fan]

The only reason I hate the Core is because it is sheer trickery.  That's right, its only practical purpose was to deceive people into walking into a store thinking they could get a 360 for $300 and be OK to game.  In fact, they also had to purchase a memory card or HDD.  (Disclaimer: the following info was the case at launch.  Obviously it's different now.)  If they bought the HDD, they might as well have simply bought a Premium -- that one comes with a wireless controller!  If they bought the memory card, the cheapest option was $40 for 64MB.  The poor suckers who went that route could barely use XBLA without running out of space, and forget about demos.

Today it's not quite as bad, with an included 256MB card and 5 free games.  And if the Arcade buyer decides to get an HDD after all, he only pays $30 more than he would have paid to buy the Premium in the first place, and he still got the 5 games and 256MB card.  Of course, with $30 you'd probably get much better games than the Arcade provides.  But the Core was one of two things:  (1) a ripoff -- only $60 cheaper (assuming you like to be able to save your progress in games) and almost no room for DLC (or even saved content like game videos etc. that a lot of games do) -- I called it "crippled" and I stand by that assessment; or (2) completely pointless if you bought an HDD -- basically you just bought a Premium with a different color scheme and a wired controller.