Stephen Totilo over at the MTV Multiplayer blog decided to spend a portion of his Halloween holiday by treating himself to the “New Xbox Experience”.

Microsoft claims that the NXE will have your Xbox 360 games loading faster than ever before, so Stephen popped in a few titles, hit record, and published the split screen results.

Per his tests, load time was cut by approximately 10 to 15 seconds across the titles he tested (Gears of War, Fable II, and GTA IV). Installs took around 11 minutes and ate up about 7 gigs of hard drive space each.

If you do the math (it’s a slow news day so I did), you’ll have to boot a game 45-70 times just to make up the lost time spent installing it in the first place. Assuming you play a game twice a day, you won’t see a return on your time investment for three to five weeks.

So, is the upfront install time and hard drive space worth it in the end? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts below.

Source: MTV Multiplayer

Nintendo of Europe marketing director Laurent Fischer has been quoted by Edge magazine saying that only “geeks and otaku” have a problem with the Wii’s 512MB of internal storage space.

The Wii is the only console of this generation to not even have the option of a hard drive, instead coming with a mere 512MB of internal space available. An additional 2GB can be added via an SD card, but this still falls far short of even the smallest console hard drive.

Now, I’m not normally somebody who tells people how to do their jobs, but I might suggest to Mr. Fischer that this is probably not a smart thing to say.

Not least of all because these Geeks and Otaku, the ones filling up their Wii’s memory, are most likely doing so by purchasing things like WiiWare games and Virtual Console titles from your company.

If you are one of these “geeks” who has filled up your memory and are annoyed that Nintendo doesn’t seem care about you, don’t worry. Ripten are here to give you an affordable and practical solution.

Using the advanced scientific method of “sticking it to the side”, you too can experience the joys of full hard drive support with your Wii.

Source: Wired