New Xbox Experience coming Nov 19th

I agree that they shouldn't had mandatory installs. The generation is almost over and I think dvd shoudl be good enough for another 2 years. I really think ms will be first out of the gate again .

Of course if your a 20 gig user you can allways just upgrade to a 60 gig or a 120 gig hardrive. my 60 gig drive had 54 gigs free. Figure that most games are 7 gigs and under and your looking at 7 games installed on that drive with a few gigs left over for dlc. The 120 gig I believe has 114 gigs left over and your looking at 16 game installs and some change. The 20 gig though only has 14 gigs free and your look at 2 games at the most. Which I agree does suck.



With nxe i'm looking at installing Rock band , GHWT , gears , left for dead and fallout 3. I think Rock band , GHWT , Gears and L4D are the ones that will stay on my hardrive and other games will come and go as I finish them. Some games may not even get installed on my hardrive.

 

+100

 

I'm quite keen on the installable games. I imagine fable 2 will benefit considerably.

It's interesting that microsoft are suddenly being very aggressive with the hard drive price. I've recently pre-ordered the 60gb hdd bundle to upgrade my 20gb system. It comes with a headset (I need a new one) and 3 months of live, and is $130nz. Compared to the old $189 for the 20gb drive. The cheapest external PC 60gb drive (full size) I could find is ~$110nz online. I understand in the US the same 360 hdd bundle will be $99 USD (which is $165nz!)

The irony is it actually makes the arcade + drive bundle much better value than the pro.

 

I fully support optional installs that the 360 is promoting. I draw a big fat line between optional installs and mandatory installs however.

Can you link me to the NZ 60gb deal? With the tanking NZ dollar, I think I may pick one up for cheap depending on shipping. Cheers :]

 

As maybe some of you know, the NXE update was leaked a day or two ago. I have installed and tried the hdd installation, and I must say that it's great. I tried Fable 2, and even if load time didn't change considerably, the noise coming from the console is much much lower. The ability menu also works now very well, loading videos of the ability much faster and in general moving more smoothly.

The bad side of installing the update ahead of time is that I won't be able to login into Live till November 19th.

I can not comment much about the new interface as I haven't had the time to try it extensively.

 

Depends... If you're wanting component OR VGA cables, you'll have to purchase them seperately. Same for HDMI, but most who want that already have the necessary cable.

Tommy McClain

 

No problem at all, just an observation and that imo we shouldnt expect dramatic speed increases since thats not what this feature was supposed to do, its just a minor positive side effect.

 

It seems there will be some games that are not installable:

Crackdown
DOAX2 ( )

 

I'm surprised someone actually admitted to owning DOAX2 (I have it, but I didn't buy it, honest. )

 

The game does have absurd load times though.

OH wait....

 

I wonder why it's the case though. :s

 

Why did you buy that abomination?

As for the uninstallable part... that's interesting. The game must be on some internal exclusion list with the firmware update, so I wonder if other games that haven't been tested in detail also may have problems. And I cannot think as to what the problem could be, other than Arwin's suggestion - the games use the HDD to cache while streaming off the DVD. If the DVD isn't used, the HDD bus would be slower trying to send twice as much data.

I'm sure someone smarter than me will give a better suggestion soon, though

 

It's a good thought. I always wondered about simultaneous I/O transfers for HDD & DVD. Though I would think that if the game were installed, and the game clearly didn't know it and tried to access files simultaneously, then the loading times would be greatly affected negatively. So perhaps MS disallows installation to prevent unoptimal experience?

Although, thinking about how Team Ninja has been so reluctant to allow one to transfer saved games to a memory card makes me wonder if there is some protected mode that devs can choose to enable.

 

How do NXE-install sizes compare to ISO sizes on the *arr* black seas? I believe there was talk initially about having "smart" installs that removed duplicate data and whatnot.

 

Didn't someone say that Gears 2 installed was 6.7G? Are all booty ISOs 6.9?

 

No they are not. Some are as small as 4.2 gigs

 

The only rule you can rely on is that they will never be bigger for single disc games. But they can definitely be smaller, and there are still a fair few games (especially older) that fit on a single layer disc.

 

Apparently Fallout 3 iso is 6.5 GB, its NXE install on the other hand is 5.9GB.
But I'd guess it's more of a padding difference than removal of duplicate data.

 

To prevent such situations, I would guess the installed version would run the Core/Arcade/HDD-less code, to prevent such issues. Of course, aggregate bandwidth would be lower (only HDD instead of HDD+DVD), which might explain the issues GTA4 has with streaming when it is installed.

 

Of course. I didn't mean to imply I supported mandatory installs.

The 60gb deal seems to have had it's price hiked to $150 (it's still on pre-order, as they aren't available yet). I hope they will still charge me $130. Even so $150 is still good, 15% cheaper than the US price. (gpstore australia doesn't seem to have it listed)

And it's actually the australian dollar that is tanking the NZ dollar buys 88c AU right now.