S.Peelman said: Wow, that's quite small. But when Ocarina of Time and Mario 3D Land are even half this size, I'm confident they can fit a lot of awesomeness into Luigi's 800MB. Amazing really, the 3DS carts can be as large as 8GB! Imagine what a game would be if it's that big !

Well considering FE probably isn't that big and it is taking me forever to play that and Denpa Men took me ~28-30 hours to play then I would assume an 8 GB RPG on the 3DS would take 365 days to complete.

Yeah, they did. I copied the data from SD-card to backup them and make a transition to bigger SD. I compressed it with bz2, that is a pretty good compression-algorithm. Probably the best loss-less compression available. It did nearly nothing on the 3DS-data. And as a programmer I know, program-code and data is usually easy to compress, so Nintendo heavily compressed it already.

Doesn't compressing make the audio and visual worse?  I am not too sure.  However, when I used to burn DVDs I would compress movies down to 4.5 GB and you couldn't really even notice any drop in quality of sound or visual (it basically looked the same as the original).

AA confirmed.  Has to be at least 1 gig to be AAA.

S.Peelman said: Amazing really, the 3DS carts can be as large as 8GB! Imagine what a game would be if it's that big !

Bloated, most likely. I suspect the focus on sound fundamentals is why most of us here prefer Nintendo games.

It is not the size that counts...  It is the way you work it!

Original Luigi's Mansion was about 300MB, so 3 times the size of the original is big enough.

I wonder when we'll see a game approach that. Resident Evil: Revelations was pretty big. Monster Hunter 4? New Zelda or Metroid?

Oh -- of course. Pokémon. Considering that's what pushed DS cartridges to their limits. just think -- X and Y will contain over 700 animated 3D models for the Pokémon alone.

Difference between lossless and lossy compression. Lossy compression has much bigger compression rates, but takes away from quality and has to know the format that is to be compressed. Lossless compression works on all sorts of data and doesn't change the data in any way like lossy compression does.

NSMB Wii was ~350MB I think. Incredibly small, even for a Wii game.
Skyrim is 3.8GB on 360. Also very small.

Just Dance 4 is over 10GB on some platforms...., so you can't really see a correlation between game size and content.