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It is finally here, and surprise, surprise, out in our ol’corner of the world before the European and the Japanese launch. What are we talking about? Why, the Xbox 360 Elite, of course! Announcing its availability at the official Xbox forums, Mohit Anand, Country Manager of Microsoft India’s Entertainment and Devices Division said that the offer was available exclusively (at the moment) via the Indiatimes Store online for a whopping INR 34,990, which, if you are any good at international monetary conversions, works out to, oh, around $842. Or £423. Or €624. Or ¥96,132. No matter how many currencies your brain tries to take it in, this makes the Indian version of the console the costliest among all launch prices in the world, practically twice the price of the US version!
The charcoal black and chrome Xbox 360 Elite comes packaged with a 120 GB hard drive with almost 17 GB of preloaded content, a black wireless controller, a black wired headset, Component and Composite multi-AV cables, HDMI cable, optical and component audio dongle, an Ethernet cable and a data exchange cable, should you want to transfer your data and settings from your existing 20 GB HDD onto the 120 GB one.
Buy the Xbox 360 Elite at the Indiatimes Store
Join us in waving goodbye to purchasing power parity. And oh, did we mention that there’s still no official presence of the Xbox Live service in India? Yeah, that!
OK, so a lot of stores don’t have the Xbox 360 Core Bundle, and rumors are running rampant that with the launch of the Xbox 360 Elite, the $50 price drop that’s going around and the new cooler, quieter “Zephyr” models of the console, that Microsoft is all set to pull a Sony and pull the Core bundle off the markets. As if to sweeten the deal, it looks like Microsoft may be selling the Premium and the Elite versions of the console in special “bundles”, with two free games, along with the usual assortment.
Bundling Forza 2 and Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, the boxes are marked “Holiday Value Bundle”, which could indicate that Microsoft might try to throw in a couple of games with the console to try and entice more people to pick it up this Thanksgiving and Christmas, considering they are so around the corner. It cannot be confirmed at this point whether the images are really “real” or they are part of someone’s Photochop Phriday phreak trick. Now if only they would actually get their act together and launch the bloody games for the console, then someone might actually be tempted to pick one up, say games like a certain Mass Effect that have been continually pushed back since May!