When I had dinner with Microsoft’s Shane Kim and Kudo Tsunoda on Monday, we talked about more than just “Gears of War 2.”

Kim is the head of Microsoft Game Studios and therefore a guy worth peppering with any gaming questions I could think of related to the Xbox 360’s Microsoft-published efforts.

Here’s some of what I asked him between bites of fish:

When will Microsoft make a game that requires and takes advantage of the Xbox 360’s hard-drive?

“You’re not likely to see a first party title that does that,” Kim said. I suggested that Microsoft had to have reached a point by now when the company could assume a large number of Xbox 360 owners have the drive. And surely the upcoming “Grand Theft Auto IV” downloadable content will require it. But still, Kim said he believed the games from MGS should be playable on all Xbox 360s and that it’s a software maker’s challenge to get the games to work without a hard drive.

Why was Microsoft just hiring new senior people for the Peter Jackson “Halo” project more than two years after it was announced?

Kim said there was nothing unusual going on here, though there was shared skepticism among me and the three other reporters at the dinner. “Clearly it’s not coming out this year,” Kim said, deflecting the idea that this was a last-minute change. He said that the job postings represented both a staffing-up and a switching of personnel.

What’s up with the Xbox 360 motion-controller code-named Newton that we broke news of recently?

Kim laughed. I asked about the article we ran. Kim claimed he doesn’t read any press.

How about the “Crackdown DLC”?

I mentioned this as a wisecrack while Kim was talking to Newsweek’s N’Gai Croal and Joystiq’s Chris Grant. Kim kept on talking to them but lightly punched me in the arm. I’ll take that as a no comment!

Why don’t you guys make a version of the “Scene It” trivia series that focuses on video game trivia, so that the hardcore gamers buy it and virally spread that style of casual gameplay to the less hardcore members of their households?

He laughed and said that only I would buy it.

What’s going on with Games for Windows?

He said: “What we need to do is figure out, ‘What do we want for this platform?’ We’ve really got to figure out what Windows is good for, what customers want out of Windows for gaming.” He said a lot of energy had been spent on things that maybe weren’t the best focus. Such as? Trying to make the Windows interface “sport the look and feel like the Xbox 360; the idea of resurrecting genres on Windows.”

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As you can probably tell, the dinner was pretty casual and chatty. It was not an official briefing, so things were kept loose. Kim didn’t want to show much of his hand, but, as always, seemed happy to represent Microsoft Game Studios as a small high-end publisher with no aspirations to become a massive game factory like Sony and Nintendo’s publishing divisions.

I don’t expect that we’ll hear much more from Kim until E3 in July.