Biggest step forward for gaming in the 21st century

[Pemalite]

SvennoJ said:

Save games worked perfectly fine on memory cards. The HDD was a bit of a step backward at first, locking your save games to your console. Memory cards were much easier keeping the save games with the games while going to a friend. No faff with exporting and importing.

With the OG Xbox you would use your memory cards to transfer save data between consoles. (Or just leave it connected to the back of your controller and take that instead.)

So your data wasn't trapped to the console. - I can't remember if you could set the default save location on the OG Xbox, I know on the Xbox 360 you could.

SvennoJ said:

HDD standard made some things better, some things worse (lengthy installs, release now, finish/patch later) It's still a joy to put an older game into a retro console and just play without installing and downloading patches. And I've never lost save games until both my 360 and PS3 failed :/

Games also got larger and more complex which necessitated it... I.E. Texture, mesh streaming.

It wasn't until the Xbox 360 was about half way through it's life cycle that games started requiring installs, before you could get away with just a memory card on a Core/Arcade console...

I don't mind installs, they allow for larger and more complex worlds to be generated... But when you see an Xbox 360 game running from optical disk and the same Playstation 3 game running from an install on the hard drive, it made people ask... What's the point?
The PS3 did run much quieter though...