Game Downloads

Bungie engineers have said that installing Halo 3 to the harddrive using the New Xbox Experience will actually result in less than optimal play. While installing games can usually result in (slightly) faster load times and a quiet disc drive, a post on the Bungie forums (reported by Joystiq) by engineer Mat Noguchi explains that installing will actually make the game load slower. When the game was being produced, it was designed to take advantage of the HDD in a specific way. "If a HDD is present, we copy maps from the DVD to the utility partition on the HDD," he says. "Even if Halo 3 is already installed on the HDD, it will still copy maps to the utility partition." The problem comes because copying from the harddrive to the harddrive is much slower, since the device can't read and write simultaneously.

Sins of a Solar Empire fans will have to wait a little bit longer to get their hands on all the goodies being offered in the upcoming Entrenchment expansion pack. But don't worry, Stardock still has your back for Christmas.

Microsoft's Games for Windows Live service hasn't exactly been the beacon of light that PC gamers may have been hoping for when it launched last year, but the PC mega-company is not giving up the ghost on its troubled initiative yet. In a recent interview with GameDaily, GFW Live senior marketing manager Michael Wolf discussed some of the changes coming to the service in the near future, including plans to introduce digital distribution.

Valve is currently celebrating the tenth anniversary of their seminal first-person shooter Half-Life, and they've taken the opportunity to temporarily drop the game's price on Steam to an astonishingly low 98 cents. Compared to the game's usual price of $9.99, that's roughly 90% off the standard cost of admission. Trust us, that's a deal you just won't find outside of, well, Tabula Rasa.

UPDATE: Almost as though directly responding to our reaction to this news, Microsoft sent us an update revealing that the official public release of Banjo-Kazooie on Xbox Live Arcade has been delayed to December 3. Microsoft notes that this move "extends the exclusive window for our preorder customers another week." Here's hoping those customers can get the code they need to enjoy that extra week.