Sony PS3 Lies and Incompetence

Sony. Great company, makes some great products. Think most people would agree with that. The problem is, they also mislead their customers…

How do they mislead their customers? By making false claims on the back of their PS3 game boxes!

Take, for example, Heavy Rain. This is, without doubt, a fantastic game and one unlike any other. Not for one moment am I going to deny this is a first rate gaming experience. It does however, mislead the customer.

If you look at the back of the box you will see it requires a “minimum of 25mb” of hard drive space. This is a lie. The game actually insists on installing over 4 GIGABYTES of data to the hard drive. We’re not talking a slight difference; we’re talking a difference of over 40 times and a large chunk of the 60GB my system has!! To compound this, the game also insists you must install an update of over 1 GB – but the only advantage I can see to this is it updates the game to use the new Move controllers, which I don’t have anyway and it took an hour to download! Try ignoring the requested update and you’ll find the game constantly nags you throughout gameplay to install it, ruining the atmosphere.

This is utterly unacceptable when spending considerable amounts of money on a game. It’s bad enough when they require patches to resolve bugs but to eat up your hard drive and then insist on filling even more needlessly is just taking the piss, in my humble opinion.

Modnation Racers is, again, a really good game but, c’mon, install the damn thing and you’ll be sat there for over an hour whilst it downloads update after update, each ridiculously large, before you can even play it! Total install? Over 5GB again.

Whilst I’m on the subject; what is it with PS3 games needing an update pretty much every time you play them!? I don’t play Little Big Planet every day admittedly but I don’t think I have ever popped that disc in and not been prompted to download a chunk of hard drive eating update, by which time it’s often too late to then play the game because I have to relinquish the TV for the use of watching some soap or other. It got to the point I just couldn’t be arsed with the thing.

I could understand the reason for PS3 games doing so if it improved the gameplay but, from experience, it doesn’t! So many times I’ve read reviews that actually advise against buying the PS3 version if you own an Xbox as the graphics are inferior (always did regret buying Saints Row 2 on the PS3 because it was cheaper!). It doesn’t appear to improve load times either, so maybe it’s just very sloppy and complacent programming.

So what happens when my PS3’s hard drive is full of needlessly large installs and unnecessarily large patches? I don’t know. What I do know is that Sony will not get another penny out of me if they think I’ll be forced to buy their new PS3 with the larger hard drive – if they were going to allow games to hog so much space they shouldn’t have installed such a small one to begin with.

Before all the fanboys jump on me for attacking the PS3, I own the PS3, Xbox 360 and Wii. My Xbox came with only the 20GB drive they were blessed with back then. I have far, far more games for the Xbox than either other console and, whilst they do require patches frequently, my 20GB hard drive was nowhere near being filled even after downloading all of the available various Modern Warfare map packs – because NO Xbox game requires you to install pretty much the entire fecking game before you can play it and the patches aren’t 1GB+! Does it improve the gameplay? No, if anything the PS3 versions are often found inferior in that department too, so what exactly is the point?

My PS3 is now, aside from exclusive titles unavailable on other systems, a glorified DVD/Bluray player. Bloody waste of what is otherwise a tremendous console.