Camelot (Mario Tennis/Golf, Golden Sun) to Pull Nintendo Support?

AFAIK, games do take advantage of the HDD, but they aren't installed onto the HDD like PC games. IIRC, I think a GB or 2 are reserved on the 360 HDD for games to use.

I think Sony has mentioned the ability to install games on a HDD, but I doubt it will really work. Even with DVD games, you'll need 4-5GB per game, and with 20GB HDDs (of which, probably only ~15GB is useable), that doesn't leave much room to put your games on. Especially if you want to put other stuff on the HDD (demos, XBLA type games, trailers, microtransactions, saves, etc.). Of course, BR games would work out even less (25GB game on a 20GB HDD?). I guess you could get bigger HDDs, but then you're already paying $500+ for the system.

This is even less of an option for the 360 since they've been treating the HDD as a nice option to have and not something required for playing games. They'd have to kill off the Core Pack in order to allow this to happen. I'm not sure if MS is willing to do that since they seem to want to get people to get one at $200 or whatever (even though they'd have to spend at least another $40-$50 in order to save a game, and they'd be missing out on XBL and Xbox games).

More like an extra 100 bucks in the asking price ($500 PS3 is basically the $400 360 Premium with a Blu-ray drive...plus some other things I guess; for 200 bucks more, you'd get 40GB more space in the HDD, WiFi, etc.).

I'm also not sure if it is just a convenience either, but we probably won't even know that until later this year (if even that early).

I'm not even sure if the 5 minute figure for Prey was with or without a HDD. Either way, I don't think it would have made much of a difference. The devs still had to add a lot of data redundancy in order to keep load times relatively low (because of the Core pack and/or because the game isn't installed on the HDD).Besides, unless a HDD is required, I'm not sure if 360 devs might not be able to use the HDD as much as they'd like.

FWIW, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony decided to include a HDD in the PS3 in order to ease the transition to Blu-ray in regards to load times. The initial load times might still be high anyway.

I'm not even that familiar with the rumor, so I don't know if there is really much behind it. It wouldn't surprise me to see that happen though.