Digital Foundry tests loading and install times of various PS3 games with different hard drives and evaluates upgrade options
As difficult and frustrating as it is, people should consider reliving the Dark Souls 2 experience, especially because of what's coming to the game.
Many of those who hate Dark Souls II hate it because it's not Dark Souls. The same people love Dark Souls III because it isn't Dark Souls II.
And so many of the issues at the centre of common complaints about DS2 are present in DS3 and sometimes even DS1. The hatred and bile spewed over this perfectly decent game is ludicrous.
I don’t think it’s a terrible game, but like a movie sequel by a different director, for me, it does NOT capture any of the “magic” felt from the Miyazaki entries. Boss battles don’t feel epic, environments don’t have the same sense of awe, the enemy variety isn’t particularly interesting, the art direction just feels bland, about the only thing I can give it praise for is some of the music.
Now, again, this is only how I feel about it, so I’m not trying to invalidate his you feel about the game, but it is the worst entry in the series due to those factors and it’s the least re-visited entry, for me.
Is it decent as a game on its own? Sure. But in comparison to the Miyazaki entries, it does not stack up and I believe that’s where many were disappointed with it.
You can also play it in VR flawlessly on PC & controller with the LukeRoss mod so… another reason to jump back in with extra immersion.
Today marks the 15th birthday of Skate 3, a truly special entry in EA's seminal skateboarding trilogy, and the last true AAA skateboarding game.
Agreed. Skate 3, Def Jam FFNY, Black, Burnout 3, NBA Street v3, TimeSplitters FP, SSX3, Mirror’s Edge, etc etc. Fantastic era, and after that EA just dropped off completely.
This is the story of how the creators of the all-time best selling console almost crippled its own successor’s early life.
They retired Ken Kutaragi, moved away from overly expensive custom hardware, and went with more traditional hardware available to the market and listened to developer needs.
It's true but also PlayStation publicly came out and stated third party wasn't important to them.
ironic that what worked for them the previous generation caused them significant pain in the subsequent one.
The PS2 was actually a significant challenge to develop for far worse than the PS1 ever was but the competition at the time was struggling so much they couldn't make up the ground Dreamcast had a stigma of being a last gen console by the time the PS2 came around and looked inferior compared to games like grab Turismo 3, the GameCube and Xbox were still a ways away and PlayStation had the reputation as being the place to play it was a perfect storm for them and the GTA games not coming to Dreamcast and Sony's embrace really helped.
Third party basically drove PlayStation yi success over more capable consoles Xbox may have looked better at the time but it didn't have GTA 3, vc, Sa or the stories games the mainline entries didn't hit the Xbox until many years after being on PlayStation.
Then the PS3 with it's cell architecture ramped it up again and just hurt Devs they didn't focus on the GPU as much as they should have and they didn't realise their deals they made with IBM could have resulted in the cell architecture being shared with Microsoft which it was and it did help them develop the 360
But really the 90s and 2000s were a wild time for game consoles now it's a little boring it's all off the shelf components and everything is mostly the same
After losing so many 3rd party exclusives, they buckled down and concentrated on amazing first party games! God of war 3, Killzone 2, resistance, uncharted, the last of us, MgS4, little big planet, demon souls and so many more games!! They won the gamers back by playing smart! Even though the media and all big gaming websites from ign, gamespot, kotaku etc were all against it!! I had fun with ps2, but it's ps3 where I really grew up and had the time of my life.
FANTASTIC GUIDE
Pretty informative article. I need to buy an SSD for my laptop, and replace the 320GB drive, which I'll then use in me PS3.
Some of this stuff I know, but it helps me find other hard drives for my PS3.
I already need 1tb.
This was a very well written guide, and actually I've recently upgraded my PS3's HDD to a WD Scorpio Black 7200rpm, 16MB cache drive. I chose this drive for a few reasons. The price difference between the Scorpio Green and Black tends to be close enough to warrant spending the extra $10-20 for the Black drive. The increased speed appeals to me, and overall I was interested in personally experiencing the difference (especially given that there has been few guides as well written as this one to detail each drive's benefits and flaws). Lastly, for the size and speed increase, this seems the best option for the amount it costs. The SSD and hybrid drives were significantly more expensive.
The one thing they don't quite touch on that's worth noting, is that due to the increased cache in some drives (over the normal 8MB cache in the stock drives), you'll notice during gameplay on certain games that some things will load in smoother and faster (this is aside from what the article is mentioning about load times and install times).
For example, I've noticed that on my old stock 5400 rpm, 8MB cache drive, certain games such as Borderlands would end up having some loading issues with textures when zoning into a new area. The textures would take sometimes 10-15 seconds to all properly load, and they would pop-in relatively harshly. Since upgrading my drive, these same textures load much smoother, and I've seen them coming in within 5 seconds now. This isn't the only benefit to this however.
Another added bonus, seems to be the loading time for accessing the XMB. I tend to get messages relatively often in-game, and so I've noticed that with the stock drive, loading the XMB could sometimes take a while, and the objects on whatever menu you are accessing would also take time to individually load in. This has also been drastically reduced, and almost consistently I've noticed all the object simultaneously loading in now, instead of individually. Anyway, I just thought I'd add this in for anyone who's interested.
Don't put a 7200RPM HDD in a PS3 slim unless you stand it vertically.
I took my fast HDD out of my old PS3 model and into the slim. The PS3 slim started to overheat.
I don't have a vertical stand yet. I placed two 1" thick boards underneath and spaced them as far apart as I could so the underside had more clearance. No issues since. I recommend finding rubber legs thicker than the ones on there now.