Silent Hill HD collection(PS3) - what the hell

Hirmuinen

Can someone explain to me why does a PS2 game, PS2 game that is on bluray disc require me to install 4 gigabytes of data on my PS3 harddrive?

Are those games so fucking big it required like 12 dvd discs on PS2? The bluray itself wasn't enough?

I have to delete every single PS1 game on my HDD just to install this one, and it's on a disc. It better look damn fine with its HD graphics.

Metal Gear Solid HD collection doesn't require me to install anything else than the save file. And it has 3 games + ps1 metal gear game(or so I think it does).
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Vlad Piranha · Posted: Mon Jul 15, 2013 12:39 pm Post subject:

Modern consoles involve a delicate tightrope walk when it comes to memory usage. The original Playstation was compared unfavorably to the Nintendo 64 on many occasions when it came to loading times since virtually all information came from the slowly loading game disc while N64 cartridges worked like solid state memory. That was a ridiculously unfair comparison, of course. In regards to modern tech, access times for actual hard drives are leaps and bounds better than loading information from a disc. Hard drive speeds have improved over the years whereas disc read speed improvements have been offering diminishing returns for a long time.

The technology is interesting, but what drives this dilemma are consumer demands. Since the days of the PSX, gamers have demanded fewer and shorter loading times due to their unrealistic expectations of new technology. The systems in question can indeed process more information much more quickly and retain huge amounts of it due to new RAM, but players don't realize that loading all of this data from a hard copy is still hamstrung unless that information comes from a new type of storage media. It's like driving a car with 400hp that only goes up to third gear. That brings us to the console HDD.

Now that consoles come with built in hard drives, there's the temptation among developers to install as much of the game data onto the HDD as possible so that there are shorter loading times, and fewer of them, to minimize interruptions during gameplay. Once a game in installed in this fashion, this gives the player the perception that a game loads more quickly. In addition, there's no longer the need to put a game on multiple discs a la Final Fantasy VII. The only downsides to this new installation procedure are install times and concerns over hard drive space, things that won't immediately frustrate consumers. I guarantee that your PS2 game put next to nothing onto memory cards and left the real loading work to the DVD-ROM, which took a while. Those were the limitations of that era of consoles. New technology fixes old problems and creates new ones, so here we are still complaining.

Hirmuinen · Posted: Tue Jul 23, 2013 11:25 am Post subject:

That could be true, but the loading times aren't that fast in this collection. I have now played some MGS2 HD version and it doesn't install anything on the HDD, but is actually much nicer looking and has less loading time.

I don't know, it just annoys me that I had to delete everything in order to play this. That said SH2 is really good. Like everything SH1 had but much better. Strange thing that only games I have played through on my PS3 are ps1 games and ps2 games...
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