Two and a half years ago, I said that rumors that the Xbox 360 would not have a hard drive as standard were evidence that either the speculators, or someone at Microsoft, were on crack.

I thought it was silly for Microsoft to become the first company to make a hard drive standard in a console instead of an option, only to become the first company to remove the same feature.

I thought it was silly to tease developers into depending on the hard drive, and then take that away.

I thought it was silly to divide the Xbox market into hard drive haves and hard drive have nots, because eventually, no matter how strenuously Microsoft asserted the opposite, it seemed inevitable to me that some Xbox 360 games would come to require the hard drive, and that eventually most would.

Some of that came to be almost immediately: the much-touted backwards compatibility feature of the Xbox 360 requires a hard drive, not only because many of the games that feature emulates depended on it (like Halo and Halo 2) but because the emulators themselves need to be downloaded and stored somewhere, although they are conceivably small enough to fit on a memory card.

Final Fantasy XI was the first 360 game to require a hard drive, and Next Generation now says that MMO developers will be allowed to require the hard drive as long as they display the requirement on the front of the box.

The other shoe has just dropped.

Hey, Microsoft– while you’re allocating that $1B charge for ring of death warranty repairs, why not give every Core owner a free hard drive? You might as well.

Bioshock: Breaking the Mold is the title, and because the limited edition of the game couldn’t ship with a book of concept art as the developers initially wanted, it’s now being offered for download in PDF format in both standard and high resolution versions. Gamers interested in the plot may want to skip the foreward by Ken Levine as it contains spoilers.

Get your copy of the art book here.

Bruce “Hippieman” Morrison at Freeverse, the developer that brought Bungie’s Marathon: Durandal to Xbox Live Arcade, has been working on a walkthrough of the game. While of course there is always the Marathon Spoiler Guide, which covers all three games, Marathon, Marathon 2: Durandal and Marathon: Infinity, Hippieman’s walkthrough includes screenshots of environments, whereas the Spoiler Guide features only maps.

Currently Hippieman’s walkthrough is a work in progress; you can download the latest version to see how far he’s gotten; he announced the file in this thread in the Xbox forums.

For those who need a different kind of help with the game– the kind needed to wring all 200 gamerscore points out of it– Xyjar posted a Marathon: Durandal Achievement Guide.

GameSpot interviews Wideload’s Scott Corley, formerly of Red Mercury and High Voltage Software, who is now heading up the Wideload Shorts department. Wideload Shorts is currently working on an Xbox Live Arcade game, said to be “nearing its final stages” with the goal of being released before the end of this year.

If you like to support a local comic shop in Huntsville, I recommend Haven Comics on Slaughter Rd just off University. I know the owner and he’s reserved a few posters in case some of THX wants them.

currently playing: Shadowrun
currently supporting: Ron Paul