I have recently installed a few disk-hungry games, all genuine, original and pissing-of. Each one takes few gigs of hard disk space and still they all require me to put-in a DVD, just to check that I have it! It’s frustrating that you have a genuine game-copy and you still have to crack it to make it more user friendly.
I have no Virtual-CD experience and don’t want to. Where the point to install few gigs and then keep DVD image on hard disk. Fortunate for me and other frustrated user there are no-cdd patches to most of new games.
PS. If you thing about buying Stalker, don’t anymore. 7 gigs of hard disk space and still feels like unfinished. Very poor user experience. IMHO 1 of 5, I would give 0 but it’s eye candy 😉
Matt Martin wrote an article that describes my feelings as a User
http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/user-friendly