The Walking Dead digital free to those troubled by stuttering issues

The Walking Dead's retail release on Xbox 360 was accompanied by a chorus of complaints about bugs and performance issues, so TellTale is offering a free copy of the downloadable version.

In a post on the adventure's forums, TellTale said the freezing and stuttering affects players using a the retail disc version of The Walking Dead with a 4GB Xbox 360 sans internal HDD.

Unfortunately the only solution to this issue is to acquire an internal HDD; a USB jobby won't do the trick, and TellTale hasn't mentioned any possibility of a patch fix.

For those unable to upgrade their console, TellTale is offering codes to download all five episodes of season one from Xbox Live Marketplace - although the whole season weighs in at over 2.8GB, so check how much space you have.

TellTale has also been investigating a second issue affecting the Xbox 360 retail release, which loads Episode 1 regardless of which instalment the player chooses to open. The autosave then delets their save file and erasing progress so far.

In another forum post, TellTale said the issue has two causes, and unfortunately only one has a guaranteed workaround: if you have an online enabled Xbox Live account, but have been playing the game in offline mode, the problem will be resolved if you're able to connect to Xbox Live while playing.

For everyone else, TellTale says it believes it has found a technical solution to both causes of this problem, and has sent a patch to Microsoft for certification.

The Walking Dead arrived at US retail in December, but has not been dated for Europe yet. Similar problems with the PlayStation 3 version appear to have been successfully patched.

Thanks, Polygon.