So, Does Installing A Game To The 360’s HDD Really Help?

Best feature of the New Xbox Experience isn’t avatars, or a new UI, it’s the ability to install games to the console’s HDD. It was – in our wildest dreams, anyway – meant to cut down on two of the 360’s biggest problems: loud DVD drives, and long waits for load times/disc caching. But does it? Eurogamer put a number of games to the test and found that…results vary. Some games, like The Orange Box, see massive decreases in load times, but others (like Halo 3) weren’t much improved. Most depressingly, Mass Effect’s famous elevator sequences were as nap-inducing as always. Turns out installing a game to your HDD does little for a game that wasn’t coded to take advantage of one in the first place. Hopefully that’s something we can expect to be rectified in the shining, glorious, post-NXE future.

New Xbox Experience: DVD vs. Hard Disk Face-Off [Eurogamer]