Xbox Live Games on Demand Review

Written by: rice and beans

The newly released Xbox Live update now gives gamers the ability to purchase and download full Xbox 360 titles to their hard drives 24/7 with the Games on Demand service. We went ahead and purchased one of the launch titles to see how well the games will run and if they're worth the purchase over physical copies. Take the jump for the full review.

Titles on the Games on Demand service are slightly smaller in size than their disc formats by a couple hundred megabytes and being installed to the hard drive could mean increased performance and less load times. So in order to fully test this out, we picked the launch title with the worst framerate slowdowns and loading times out of the bunch. Better yet, probably the entire Xbox 360 game library. Yep, we picked Sonic the Hedgehog.

Downloading games is easy enough. Just go to the Games on Demand section, choose the game that you want to download, and buy it with either the option of Microsoft Points or with a credit card (hit the Y button to toggle between them). If you don't have enough points, you can also buy the the different them at annoying preselected amounts of MSP's at 500 ($6.25), 1000 ($12.50), 2000 ($25.00) , 5000 ($62.50). If games have a standard of 400, 800, and 1600MSP, why not just choose go by packets of 400 and not 500? Sneaky marketing Microsoft... [insert suspicious eyes here].

Getting down to the game itself, the download took a little over 2 hours on DSL connection that averages at about 600 kb/s downstream which really is great for a 5.16GB game. Loading it up is just like starting any game installed to the hard drive. Just hit Play Game and you're good to go. One peeve that I have is that the Games on Demand service is bare bones. It'd be nice to have the option of viewing the game's manual in the Xbox Live Marketplace instead of going online with your web browser, digging up the manual on Xbox.com, and downloading a .PDF version.

Now if you've played the next-gen Sonic the Hedgehog before, then you'll likely remember the ridiculous amount of load times, glitches, and slowdown that went with it. Oh and don't the forget the bad gameplay. It is considered one of the worst Sonic games to ever be made this side of Sonic Labyrinth for the Game Gear where Sonic loses his shoes and is then forced to walk and solve puzzles in a labyrinth. It's hard to imagine anyone who could put up with all the issues and find this a great game other than some crazed furry fan with a recolored Sonic avatar he, she, or he-pretending-to-be-she thinks they own the “rights” to.

The first level I chose to test out was the Wave Ocean Trial in Sonic's episode. On the disc format, loading the level clocked in at about 22 seconds and the Games on Demand loaded at 17 seconds. I found the 5 second difference to be convenient, nothing too great, but still good nonetheless. After the level loaded, the gameplay was no different. All of the slowdown and glitches that were there on the disc are still present on the Games on Demand version.

Other load times were similar with Silver's boss level against Sonic clocking in at 17 seconds on the disc and 14 seconds seconds on the hard drive. The 3-5 second difference helps out the ridiculous amount of loading of this poorly coded game and is a good sign that less load time results will be the same on other titles. Games that stream their content like Grand Theft Auto or Half-Life 2 may be the ones to benefit from service the most and possibly have completely seamless and load free gameplay.

And to squash the rumors in the Sonic community that Sonic the Hedgehog was being reworked for the launch, it was not. All of the glitches are still there from Tails' twitchy flight controls, Rouge getting stuck on the walls, and the mini-Sonic infinite jump. No, the Rainbow gem is probably not in this version either.

Overall, the service has potential but the price points still need to be worked out. If Microsoft really wants their Games on Demand service to take off, then they need to treat it like an actual retailer by staying competitive with their prices. As of right now though, there's no reason to choose the Games on Demand service over a retailer given the limited space on hard drives and convenience of a disc. You have to remember, there are still a lot of people out there with 20GB (or really 13GB because of the reserved space) hard drives. Games on Demand right now seems more like a premium service. Something made to be convenient, but serves as nothing more.

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