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The fine folks
at Xbox LIVE are making all of our
lives easier by offering up some of
their key titles for download. Not
Xbox titles mind you, not arcade
titles… they already do both of
those… now with the latest update
they are offering up Xbox 360 titles
for download. There are negatives to
this and there are certainly
positives. Let’s review:
Negatives: Most
of these are priced too high.
Generally because you can
find something cheaper on the
hard drive. There’s also the fact
that the files for the games
themselves are huge. This takes A.)
forever to download on about 75% of
the internet connections in the
U.S.A. and B.) a HUGE amount of hard
drive space. The hard disk stuff is
really going to become an issue with
these games. Basically you can have
two on your hard drive at a time
unless you’ve upgraded. That’s just
too much space taken up.
Positives:
There’s a certain amount of ease of
just purchasing through your console
and downloading directly to your
console instead of hitting up a
retailer and going through the car,
the line, etc. The point is it’s
easier to download. It’s also cool
to be able to look on things through
the Xbox LIVE interface- play a demo
and then buy a game. The game also
runs off of your hard drive so it
generally runs better with shorter
load times.
Summary: I
think here the positives outweigh
the negatives. Sure the price on
some of these titles is lame but
it’s somewhat neutralized by the
fact that you can try these games
first and then download them. It’s
also a lot better than hitting up a
retailer. It’s amazing how digital
of an age we really are becoming,
we’re going to wake up five years
from now and wonder when the
transition actually happened. This
is just another way that the
transition is happening… and it’s
not a bad thing either.
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