Game spaces

In these wacky times where a colossal 120Gb hard drive will cost you less than two PC games, I wonder just how different things are for Joe (PC) Gamer from, say, 1996. Back then, he might have had one hundredth of the disk space he has today - just 1.2Gb, yet each game occupied just a few dozen MB. Today's games demand 1GB, 2GB, or more - the drives may be 100 times larger, but so are the games we install on them. And after allowing room for Joe's tens of gigabytes of MP3s and DivX movies - unheard of seven years ago - he actually has room for far fewer games than he did in 1996.

And while I'm at it, what happened to the practice of installing a game's core files to the hard disk, while leaving level data, music and FMV to be streamed from the CD-ROM? The modern DVD-ROM drive is surely swift enough to cope far better with this kind of task. I guess that "back in the day" it was both an effective anti-piracy measure (CD burners were still >£200 and SCSI-only) and, with the limited size of hard drives, a practical necessity. Nowadays games, if they do use the CD to play, just nudge it on startup for copy protection. Developers see no point in making their own lives more complicated by leaving data on the disc-with-a-"c". For those of us who haven't quite got round to purchasing that second 80GB drive, though, it would be rather convenient.

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