DAILY MANIFESTO

Time Trolled By My Own PS3

Posted on Monday, September 10 @ 12:33:24 Eastern by Anthony Severino

I love my PS3. More than I enjoy my other consoles. Call me a fanboy if you want, but we all have our preferences. For example, I like big butts and I cannot lie. You other brothers may deny it, but you show preference to one thing over another, time and time again.

So why then? Why must my PS3 treat me this way? Why when I only have a short amount of time to spare, my PS3 trolls me to tears?

This morning, my wife took my daughter to the dentist. I didn't have to rush to work (going from my living room to my home office isn't much of a commute), so I decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet by loading up Tekken Tag Tournament 2 in my PS3, to play on my beautiful HDTV I rarely get to game on anymore, and cranked up my night-club quality sound system to near-deafening levels. All wanted to do is kick some ass quickly in full HD and 7.1 surround.

Is that too much to ask? Apparantely, yes.

Before I started all of this, I glanced at the clock. 9:01am. Perfect. That gives me roughly an hour, I thought to myself.

9:04am: Version 1.01 is available for download. I braced myself for impact... but it ended up not being so bad.

9:05am: You must first install the game data. Fuuuuuuuuuuck.

9:21am: Populating trophy data, whatever that means.

9:22am: This game features an auto-save feature, you must exit the game and enable it in "Settings" on the XMB. Nah, I'll pass this time.

9:24am: Select my modes. At character select screen... Now loading.

9:26am: I throw my first punch.

25 minutes. 20 minutes, plus five more. Just to throw one punch. Now imagine if I had to update my PS3 firmware, too? I'd have to set aside damn near an hour just to get the game to start once.

Don't blame Tekken Tag Tournament 2, either. I'm just using this as an example. And I only timed this because I knew—I just fucking knew—that this was going to happen. It always does. No matter what game.

The same thing just happened with the last game I played through: Sleeping Dogs. And it's the very reason why I still haven't tried Metal Gear Solid 4—my favorite game of this generation—again since it was update to feature trophies.

I'm a busy guy. I have a family, and I have very little free time to enjoy games anymore. And when I do, I almost always loose out on half of that free time to updating and installing.

There's no moral to my story. I just wanted to bitch. That and I sincerely hope that shit like this doesn't happen in the next generation.

Tags: ps3

Comments

Jonathan_Leack
Joined: Jan 2012

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 12:56 pm
Your time got pwned.

0 2

De-Ting
Joined: Nov 2006

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 1:04 pm
See, I hope the next generation of consoles can process this stuff nearly instantaneously. The only problem is the internet. The slow, slow, internet.

0 3

LawnGnome
Joined: Apr 2007

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:07 pm
There needs to be a way to set it to keep select games up-to-date through background downloading or something.

0 0

sandineyes
Joined: May 2008

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:13 pm
I think that is difficult to judge. The main issue is installing the data, and if you compare the sequential write speed of the hard drive, the read speed of the optical drive, and potential download speed as an alternative to using a disk, I think you'll find that the hard drive is more than capable of keeping up with either the optical drive or download speed, and considering the blu-ray drive is x2 (or 72Mbps), much faster than any consumer-grade internet connection, the real limit is the optical drive. 16 minutes could read something to the order of 8.6GB at x2, or half that at x1. That should suffice to say that the drive would operate at its maximum speed of x2, since according to teh Googles, this game uses 7.5GB of space.

So, considering x12 blu-ray readers can be bought rather cheaply, hopefully they will make it into the next generation of consoles, as if they can be used reliably at that speed, it would be able to read at 432Mbps, at which the drive could read 7.5GB of space in about 2 and 1/3 minutes. Although that doesn't quite account for the discrepency between 8.6GB of theoretical reading, and 7.5GB of actual disk usage. Perhaps access times.

Well, this post certainly got more involved than I intended, but I guess the more you know...

0 1

thedarkstar
Joined: Feb 2011

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 1:35 pm
I hear ya man. I have a daughter who will be 2 in December and it takes a lot of time. While I love my PS3, I just turn on my 360 if this happens to me.

0 0

Bras
Joined: Jul 2008

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 1:49 pm
If you've not played Gran Turismo 5 in over a year, then do not under any circumstances put that disc inside your PS3.

0 5

shandog137
Joined: Mar 2007

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Hilarious...I overstand

0 1

maca2kx
Joined: Jul 2002

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 2:35 pm
These hurdles are the prime reason I hate having to test a PS3 at work.

0 0

Sourdeez
Joined: Feb 2012

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:18 pm
um... with a strong pc you can update faster specially on a RAID setup?
This doesn't really help for playstation exclusives :(

0 0

Sourdeez
Joined: Feb 2012

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:19 pm
Oh uh... let the console update while you take a shower?

0 2

TheJx4
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Sep 12th, 2012 at 2:30 pm
An hour shower.

0 0

ADX182
Joined: Aug 2012

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 3:33 pm
I just pack a bowl, while installing or updating/downloading.

1 4

tinymhg
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Gee. A bowl of what? Nothing illegal I hope.

0 1

Chunibrow
Joined: Mar 2010

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 9:02 pm
A bowl of underage children, what did you think he meant?

0 2

ADX182
Joined: Aug 2012

Posted: Sep 11th, 2012 at 7:27 am
Uh... a bowl of "cereal". Thats it cereal.

0 2

moretokes
Joined: Apr 2011

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 7:02 pm
I got high speed Internet but for some reason it took two days to download fight night champion

0 0

TheJx4
Joined: Jun 2011

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Does PSN handle connections worse than the 360? I can download 5GB files on my Xbox in a third of the time it takes on PS3. Also, downloading and installing is one process.

I'm all for buying full games on PSN, but man is it a *****. Download. Takes forever. Install. Takes forever. Then I'm locked out for a few minutes for some strange reason, before I can finally play.
I feel bad for anyone with a slower connection than me...like my friend David. Who has been downloading one game for 3 days.

0 1

dirty_f
Joined: Nov 2010

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 6:45 pm
Maybe some sorta notification scheme. Doesn't necessarily help for when you want to play a game but say if you are about to watch a movie or use it for something else non-gaming it will tell you which of your games need updating. Then make it all happen whilst watching le film.

Or perhaps being able to update from external hardware? Like how my PS3 connects to my Vuze program on my laptop. I can load up movies on my computer and my PS3 will play em wirelessly. Say i open up Vuze when i'm on my 'puter, n it tells me which of my games need updating. I can just do it from there.

0 0

Ananymous
Joined: Apr 2011

Posted: Sep 10th, 2012 at 7:27 pm
Welcome to five years ago... lol

I actually think my old fat 80GB PS3 downloaded much faster than my new 320GB slim, I never had any issues running downloads and all that jazz on that one but man this slim is slow!

I've gotten used to it considering if something is gonna take a while I bust out the Vita, switch to the Wii, play on my phone or laptop, etc.

0 0