Halo 3 now on games on demand.

[=sw=warlord]

Halo 3 is now on games on demand for £19.99

Took them long enough, I saw a advert on my dashboard for this last year but it got pulled after about 3 hours of it being up.

[flibitijibibo]

Always interesting to see what kind-a stuff they put up on the marketplace. A question I've always had with it though: are those purchases bound to an account (Steam style)? If not, that would piss me off having to rebuy Halo after a RRoD.

[=sw=warlord]

Always interesting to see what kind-a stuff they put up on the marketplace. A question I've always had with it though: are those purchases bound to an account (Steam style)? If not, that would piss me off having to rebuy Halo after a RRoD.

Once purchased, you can download as many times as you like with that account, pretty much the same as steam.

[Sever]

Yes, any purchases and limited-time-only downloads (ex.: the free Bungie Day dashboard theme, which was only briefly available for download) are bound to your account.

[paladin]

Thats good and bad. Good because unlimited dls, bad other accounts on the xbox cant play it alone

[sdavis117]

This seems strange. I thought Bungie had an issue with Halo 3 being installed to the Hard Drive.

[Limited]

Really slow game loads...yay!

[Sever]

The hard drive issues were with multiplayer and reading from the disc. I'm pretty sure it's impossible for them to not have fixed this issue, since a direct download simply doesn't have any disc.

[Pyong Kawaguchi]

The hard drive issues where due to the fact that maps are compressed and when they load off of an hdd they get uncompressed into the hdd, thus if its coming from the hdd, it slows down.

[Kornman00]

The maps aren't compressed (however, some resource data inside the maps are, but even still, they aren't decompressed until those resources are actually needed at runtime and only in memory)

The issue is that when the engine sees that there is a HHD it will copy the map you're trying to load, plus a few shared maps (which total out to about a gig or so themselves IIRC) over to a temp. cache drive (this is what the Xbox 1 did). So if you have the game installed to your HHD already, it will be just like copying the files to a different folder (and on the same drive).