from a guy who's worked in the video game industry for about 6 years.

Which games can be saved to the hard drive? Which ones can not? Is a memory card really necessary?

All 73 currently released XBox games can be saved onto the hard drive.

The memory card is only needed if you want to take your saves or your XBox Live account info over to a friend's house to use on their xbox.

ok, I've been misinformed then. I was under the impression that you had to have the memory card to save games, just like the PS2. I thought the hard drive was only for the music swapping and internet functions. Thanks for clearing that up, Flay.

Unfortunately a few games don't save to the memory card at all. This is my only real gripe about the Xbox memory card. All games save to the HD though.

there is a workaround, as i'm sure you already know

If you're in a game, why would you want to save to a memory card at all? Saving to the hard drive is much, much faster. Then when your gaming session is over, you can copy your saves to the memory card all at once for backup or portability purposes.

The only downside to this I can possibly think of is if the hard drive happens to die during a gaming session - before you copy the files to the memory card. But the chances of that happening and you losing all your gameplay is very low, unless you play for 10 hours at a time or something.