Downloadable demos are awesome.
one of the things i really like about the 360 and the live marketplace is that you can download demos for different games. obviously you need the hard drive, since they weigh in at 500+ MB each, but you can download playable demos of a few different games, with more being added. Right now looks like you can get demos for NBA Live 2006, Madden 2006, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Kameo, and probably a couple others that i don’t remember offhand.
And of course, for all Arcade titles, you can download a free trial version to see if you like it before shelling out the cash points for the full version.
December 7th, 2005 at 5:36 pm
500mb? How long do they take to download? How big are the arcade titles?
December 7th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
arcade titles are usually 15-30 mb. Looks like the biggest one out right now is Bankshot Billiards, at 36.52 MB. They don’t take very long to download. I timed billiards it took almost exactly a minute.
As for the demos, well they take about 20-30 times longer, since they’re 500MB or larger. It depends on your connection speed really. The NFS:MW demo took a long time, at least 30 minutes to download, but it’s 960MB, which is huge, 30 times larger than billiards. (It’s a really pretty game. Some fun gametypes, i hadn’t played a NFS title in a long time. The controls aren’t great though, and I doubt I’ll buy it, definitely not for $60. Maybe if it comes down to $20 or $30.)
Unfortunately you can’t download in the background, so you have to leave it downloading while you go read a book or cook some dinner or something, or switch over to TV.
However, if you’re in the middle of downloading and you have to go, you can cancel it and resume the download later where it left off.