Gamernode: News - Misinformed McGuire mulls mandatory memory

Some games on 360 could have benefitted from some pre-loading onto the HDD. Pretty much any UE3 game, would have helped immensely with the ungodly texture pop-ins...
BUt having to use a quarter of your drive to install the game, just to even play it? What's going to happen a few months down the road, when half your library requires an install, and there's only enough HDD space for 2-3 games?

Their efforts to reduce load times seem to have been a step backward...

I'll stick with my load times, if this is the alternative, thankyouverymuch.

I don't believe load times are the real issue, how about add on content such as game patches and extra levels. Without a hard drive you cannot download or install as much content. A memory card is only a fraction the storage space as a hard drive. To this point I thing M$ made a mistake by not making a HDD standard. The other thing M$ did was make the HDD in the 360 non user replaceable. Now we all know if you really want to replace the HDD you can but M$ did not make it easy, while sony is sticking to the PS3 as being a computer, anyone can swap out drives and run the OS drive format utility to get any size drive they want.

Both are great systems with individual advantages and disadvantages but load time is negligable compared to other uses for an onboard HDD.

OOPS forgot the most import thing in my rant.
Movies, TV shows, and Music. M$ is pushing the 360 as a media center but oops, you bought a 360 without a HDD so good luck downloading those tv shows.
Now THAT is a big mistake by M$.

"The other thing M$ did was make the HDD in the 360 non user replaceable. Now we all know if you really want to replace the HDD you can but M$ did not make it easy,"

Er, what?

The HDD is accessible right from the top of the console, the push of a button and it's disconnected. Takes like, a second. Literally. Now, the drives are proprietary, yes. But hard to find and hard to replace, they are most certainly not.

...and only one model comes without the HDD- the Arcade.


I think the big mistake in the second part of your rant is the customer who didn't research their product before they bought it. If they bought a 360 to use as a media center, and didn't get one with an HDD, that's their own damn fault. Goes right along with everything else in this new HD digital era- don't do your research, and you'll end up with an entire entertainment center of various expensive separate components that don't play nice together. And besides, if they find out they just might need an HDD, they can *gasp* buy one anyway! It's not like the HDD-less 360 is worthless forever. A 20gb drive is comparable to the price of a game!

As a counterpoint, sure it's great that every PS3 comes with an HDD, but if a single game can potentially take up a 1/4 of that drive, then that makes the continued utility of the HDD questionable when more games begin to utilize the same practice.

You talk about HDD swapping being difficult on the 360 (which, it most definitely isn't, it's far more tricky on the PS3!!!), but what about when you have to swap your HDD every other time you swap out a game?

One of the real problems rtanger, is that because there are systems out there with no HDD, there is an imposed limit on xbox live for game file size. If you have ever played Tekken 5 hd on the ps3, you can see the potential of larger file size games on the box. And Microsoft does not want to leave out the gamers who have no hdd.

When I first picked up my 360, I had to get a core system (other was sold out). Later, I picked up my tiny 20 gig hard drive for a whopping $89. True, you can pick up a used one at gamestop for $59 now, but that is still ridiculous. Making the hdd proprietary was a real d*ck move on MS's part. The 120 gig I picked up for my ps3 was cheaper and less noisy than the tiny 20 gig MS model. Unlike the 360, I've never had to erase a ps3 demo to make room for one I wanted. And it is not that I don't have the cash, it is the principal that I will not drop the money for another 360 hdd.

And as a developer, if you want to thread from both the hdd and blue ray/dvd drive you can't on the 360. You would be alienating a large group of 360 owners. As stated, it is not much of a problem performance wise. But I have to wonder, with that monster always spinning at breakneck speeds, if that could be part of the heat problem that killed my 360's.

In my experience as a retail manager, people who buy the Arcade don't have internet. They just want to play single player games. So any of the problems ninjalegend is talking about, don't affect them.

Creighton DeSimone

The real question is, are you willing to plop in 4+ discs to get the same hi-def content the PS3 offers? The Blu-ray Disc may have transfer rate issues, but at least a little brain matter and $90 will alleviate any install file size issues you seem to want to place emphasis on. DVD format's main crutch is its limited file size. Blu-ray won support because the 30GB discs offer more room for varying texture sizes than the current DVD9 format.

The transfer speed issue will only remain an issue for so long before it no longer is one. McGuire has a point and saying otherwise is just rabid console fanaticism poking through the veneer. You do not see computers loading levels off of a disc now do you?

I have yet to plop in more than one. It's in Sony's best PR interest to come out with games that need 50 GB in optical storage. That doesn't mean that good games in general need anywhere near that much.

I bought a core system first myself, but I know now that it was a mistake. I should have sprung for the real system (with HDD) from the start. The biggest benefit of requiring a hard drive is that you can cache data for quicker access. I realize this is a bigger issue on the PS3 because of the data access issues already mentioned. However, on the 360, access is only significantly faster on the outer tracks of the DVD. You can't fit the whole game on the outer tracks alone.

If HDD caching doesn't yield significant benefits to data streaming in big game worlds, then I'd point the finger at the developers, not the premise. The premise is quite sound. They simply didn't implement it well enough.

Sorry, but I'm with McGuire on this. We see a lot of games where textures aren't loaded until well after gameplay has begun (Gears of War, Bioshock and Mass Effect come to mind immediately). Having textures pre-loaded to the hard drive would have helped this immensely.

OK, eight. So tell me why live arcade has a file size limit and psn does not. Here is a hint. Itis not because microsoft hates us. Also tell me why the system without the hard drive is called the "Arcade" system?