Fight Night Champion Hard Drive Evaluation

*Fight Night Champion is in hand so impressions, screens, and videos will be posted through the weekend and on Monday. Follow on Twitter for additional glimpses at the game and thoughts on it as I play through.

Continuing with the series of Xbox 360 hard drive installation evaluations I’ve gone through and compared several areas of Fight Night Champion based on loading times from the disk vs the hard drive. Thankfully the loading times with Fight Night Champion are much more reasonable than those that plagued the last release from the company (EA Sports MMA).

Install time- 8:39
Install size- 5.4 GB

Loading Times
Boot to main menu- 55 seconds disc vs 45 seconds HDD (10 seconds)
Load into fight now- 31 seconds disc vs 21 seconds HDD (10 seconds)
Leave fight to menu- 6 seconds disc vs 6 seconds HDD (No change)
Load into “Champion” mode- 22 seconds disc vs 12 seconds HDD (10 seconds)
Load into Legacy career mode- 4 seconds disc vs 3 seconds HDD (1 second)

The installation shows worthwhile improvement when booting up the game and loading into fights and the story mode. It should be noted that loading into “Champion” mode goes right into the last cut scene in the story. That scene is covering up the loading time as it can not be skipped until the loading is complete. Installing to the hard drive is recommended for the reduced noise and wear and tear put on the system in addition to any improvements seen in loading times.