PS3 Game Installs, God of War 3 Goes Without

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You’d be a hero if you can name five games in 60 seconds that don’t install to the PlayStation 3′s hard drive. They’re rare, that’s for certain, and only come out at night. The technical reasons for hard drive installations should be readily apparent: running a game directly from disc can result in slow load times, among other problems. Plus, you’d need a ludicrous amount of system memory (RAM) to do so, since the data would still need cache (queue up) somewhere off the disc for processing. With Blu-Ray technology in particular, this poses a unique issue because seek times of BR drives are much, much slower than your standard CD/DVD-ROM drive. As such, installation data is much faster for the game engine to access because hard drives have much faster seek times, data can be queued up ahead of time by separate processor threads, and data can be swapped between the hard-drive and RAM via the page file efficiently.

Regardless of their technological benefit, the issue comes to fruition when the gamer pops a PS3 game into the drive and has to wait several minutes, sometimes more for larger games, for the data to install. There’s been numerous jokes and jabs aimed at the PS3 for this phenomenon, and I can sympathize with the frustration. Go play the overall Game of the PS3 – Metal Gear Solid 4 - and you’ll see and fully understand the frustration surrounding hard-drive installs. It’s not just one, it’s multiple installs during key transitions in the game. If it were a single installation at the start, it would’ve taken almost an hour.

But God of War 3 is going naked. That’s right, NO INSTALLATION!!!! The Blu-Ray disc GoW3 ships on is dual-layer, meaning it can hold a whopping 50GB of data. GoW3 uses 35GB of it – large. That’s chump change for modern hard-drives, but for a slim disc of plastic, that’s a huge amount of data. Xbox 360: eat your heart out. Your dual-layer DVDs can only hold 9.4GB of data. To run GoW3 on the 360 with no installation, it would take 4 DVDs in the box, and multiple disc swaps mid-game.

It’s also being reported that GoW3 may be the most technically advanced and efficient PS3 game ever produced. The load times between sections are mere seconds, not minutes as you’d expect. Being that this massive game is streaming directly from the disc into RAM, and doing it this efficiently, I can see why it’s being touted as such a technological leap forward in Blu-Ray prowess.

Heavy Rain's Origami

On the flip-side, Quantic Dream’s Heavy Rain installation is 4GB and takes about 7-8 minutes. However, the developers put a small activity in the game box to help you pass the time. As you know, Heavy Rain is an interactive story about the Origami Killer. The game box has an origami on the cover. Included in the box is a flat sheet with some lines on it. During the install, you can follow along with on-screen instructions on how to turn that flat sheet into the actual origami pictured on the cover! What an ingenious way to help gamers pass the time!! And no-one has done this before? I’d gladly fold paper, craft spaghetti towers, or knit a quilt if it meant NOT watching the install progress bar struggle to reach 100%! AHHHH!!!