When we recommended last week that “you have a fair amount of space on your hard drive, say, 629 megs,” for this week’s Xbox LIVE Arcade title, Portal: Still Alive, we weren’t kidding.
Surprise! Portal: Still Alive in available on Xbox LIVE today and it weights in at — you guessed it — 629 megs. If your hard drive is full or you don’t have one at all, don’t say we didn’t warn you; this officially makes Portal Still Alive the biggest Xbox LIVE Arcade game to date, breaking the current XBLA size-cap of 350 MB.
When we question Microsoft’s Aaron Greenberg at Tokyo Game Show on the size of Portal Still Alive, he couldn’t comment on the game specifically, but did address the reason for cap increases.
“We don’t want to limit developers from a creative standpoint,” he told us. “So if they want to create bigger, more immersive-style games for digital distribution, [we] absolutely want to support that.”
“At the same time, you want to also not forget about efficiency,” he warns. “There are ways you can make your games smaller and more efficient and not impact the experience.”
Obviously, Portal: Still Alive was not one of those games. With Sony pushing larger scale digitally distributed titles on PlayStation 3, we have a feeling it won’t be long before Still Alive is dwarfed by other XBLA titles.
