And yet I can’t stop listening to him, week after week. Here there be Kool-aid fans, ladies and germs.
Never hiding my blatant Microsoft fanboydom, I will shovel unmeasured heaps of Xbox 360-related propaganda in my brain with the tenacity of a strung-out coke whore. It’s honestly unfortunate to hear the frustrating softball questions, and the blind defense of poor technological solutions. Let us take the latter of these as a jump-off point…
Major Nelson will usually force a pause at the end of his podcasts, creating an “aftershow” which allows him to (I guess?) give his “off-the-books” remarks to his eager audience. In a sickeningly biased statement, Major Nelson defends the noisy DVD drive of the Xbox 360, stating that the Blu-Ray disc “only spins at 2X, while our DVD drive runs at 16X. I mean, we could slow it down to 2X IF YOU WANTED, but then you’d have to deal with corresponding load times…” (Check the last two minutes of his most recent podcast for the full blast)
Sir Nelson…can I point you to your colleague Andre Vrignaud’s article regarding the MUCH more comparable drive speeds?
I have always believed that true advancement can only be found when an honest lens is pointed inward AND displayed outwards for all to see, criticize, jeer, and judge. Outside of the interviews, this is certainly an issue with the medium of the podcast being a one-directional communication medium, but all I can really hope for is that the community will find other ways to bring these sorts of things to the greater attention of Microsoft (you know, besides some greenhorn blog…)
I find candid fanboydom to be the only way to truly appreciate a particular thing, be it a console, a retail outlet, or a football team. But PLEASE Larry! We need your brain AND your heart in this! Hell, even IGN will lay into Peter Moore when it’s warranted…
Listen, nobody here is advocating that anyone needs to be rude, but I really think that the industry needs to answer for the choices it has made. My girlfriend has made more than a reference or two about the Xbox 360 being “my baby”, and yet you’ll still here me rabidly attacking the jet engine that is the 360′s DVD drive, as well as the 13GB of addressable space on the 360′s optional hard drive. (Oh yeah, and it doesn’t have to be THAT optional, guys…bump that 20GB down to $50, and release a 100GB, $100 model! The people will love you!) I know, I know, those two things are for another rant…
Perhaps it’s that, even though I particularly dislike The Major’s specific brand of communication, it doesn’t really serve M$’s interests to have someone who, for whatever reason, doesn’t always balance the story honestly and fairly. I know journalism has much more to do with spin than with facts, but this can simply be executed better. Give US the access to these folks for interviews, Larry…we’ll ask them the questions you’d get fired for asking. 
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