Any bets on the fact that once installs are on Xbox, it will suddenly be a perfectly acceptable process, regardless of the fact that it will likely take even longer than standard installs on PS3.



Any bets?

Games like GTA4 will greatly benefit from this as the game is always streaming from the disc, playing from the hard drive will help speed up loading times and reduce pop ups on the map when going at fast speeds. I for one am looking forward to this.

In my experience, the PS3 generally loads games faster than the 360.



It sort of balances out; the 360 will have optional full game installs to increase speed, while the PS3 has mandatory partial game installs to increase speed. In either case, you've got to have the disc in; so now you can have part or all of a game on the HDD with good speed on both systems.

it can't become standard.



why? because there are still Core/Arcade users out there. you can't bank on a installation process... if some of your consumers don't have a place to install it.



XBox360 games have no choice but to be optional.



but, for those that can do the installation... it's a good thing to do so... like others have said, once installed, it cuts down on load times. so long as you don't constantly uninstall/delete then reinstall and play for more than a few hours before going to the next game... you should see benefits in it.

hopefully it fixes the freezes on halo 3 certain times.





Like Loa...checkpoint kind of thing lol

I don't think many 360 Premium owners have considered this but realistically you will only be able to install one game at a time on a 20GB HDD. A brand new 20GB HDD only gives you 13.9GB space for storage (due to M$ installed components/software).



Devil May Cry 4 is quite a big game, so if you intended to play a few games over the space of a week or a month, you will either have to play them from the DVD or delete that data and sit through another 10 minute installation for every game.



GTA4 is slightly smaller than DMC4 and takes up approx 6.36GB of space. If you have a few arcade titles and lots of music stored on the HDD, you're out of space for another installation.



So while you will feel the benefits that the PS3 gets from many of it's games (like GTa4), you're being forced into either buying a larger HDD which is still nowhere near as big as what's available on the PS3 and costs nearly 2x as much as a 320GB or delete all other content from the HDD.



Elite or owners of a 120GB HDD are slightly better off, but you will ultimately experience longer loading tames if you play a multitude of games and go back to them time and time again.

I forgot to mentiont the load times are based on both versions of GTA4

it says that the install of devil may cry 4 took twice as long on the PS3

You will certainly see reduced load times in Oblivion on interior/exterior and fast travel transitions. Another thing to be aware of is that Oblivion streams a lot. My fiancee plays Oblivion a lot and she complains about occasional pausing while the game loads to keep up with her while on the world map. Her character has ridiculously high agility and sometimes moves too fast for the streaming to keep up. I would expect HDD installing to eliminate streaming lag for her. I'll definitely be installing Oblivion to my HDD as much as she plays it.



I spend the weekend playing Crackdown and noticed that the DVD drive chatters almost constantly whether my agent is moving or just standing still.



Pretty much all streaming games are worth installing to the HDD just for the sake of reducing wear on the DVD drive.