2nd November 2016, 9:45 PM
So now that I have a hard drive, here are more things for the "bad stuff about the PS3 OS" list!
- Sometimes, when you're downloading stuff, it will randomly quit you out of the store for no reason
- The store OS works terribly and, when you go to download something and then back out back to the search list you were just on, will almost never actually leave the title you just downloaded selected. Instead, something far above it will be selected.... usually the very top game in the list. Considering that everything is very slow to navigate and the PS3 demos list is over 500 games long, this is a huge problem, scrolling all the way down every time is really tedious! There isn't any kind of fast-move either, unlike the 360 which lets you scroll by pages with the shoulder buttons. If you want to download a bunch of stuff the PS3 store is barely usable.
- Downloads are really slow. I know I only have the PS3 connected by wi-fi, not wired internet as I have with the 360 (because I only have one cable long enough to go from the router to where my consoles are), but still, all that I've heard about how slow PSN downloading is seems to be true.
- I know I said this before, but it's seriously weird that you need to install things, and those install times are slow for large games.
- Worst of all, the PS3 apparently only supports one save location at a time. So, after I installed the hard drive, it asked me if I wanted to switch the save location over to that. If you say no, the HDD basically doesn't exist and is inaccessible. If you say yes, the 12GB internal flash basically doesn't exist and is inaccessible (unless you remove the hard drive and thus go back to it). That's just insane design! IF you have internal flash and a hard drive, you must allow people to use both sources. The PSP lets you run games off of the disc or out of the flashdrive menu, and the X360 allows you to save and load from the internal flash, hard drive, or, for save files, cloud saves... and it now even has 2TB external hard drive support too, though this was only added this year and surely would be slow considering that the 360 doesn't have USB 3.0. But anyway, on PS3, you have none of that, only "only the HDD" or "only the flash". What I've read online about the PS3 not supporting external hard drives at all now makes sense, how could it when it can't even support both its hard drive and what is basically an internal flash drive?
- So, in one positive, the PS3's maximum hard drive size allowed is 1TB, twice the size of the largest hard drive size the X360 supports, 500GB. That's good. However, after transferring over the stuff from the flash memory, before I had downloaded or installed anything else the system said it had only 829 of 919 GBs free! Uh, the internal flash was only 12GB, yes? So why did almost ten times that much space get used up? Sure, I'm unlikely to fill this up anytime soon given that I'm not subscribing to PSN Plus and thus aren't getting all those free game that that have now almost filled up my 360's hard drive, but still, that's kind of weird. Is there some big internal flash thing that it can't access if you have a hard drive plugged in and had to copy over, was this some massive system update, or what? Whatever the explanation, that doesn't make much sense.
On another note, because you were talking about it, I gave Dark Souls another try, this time on the 360 (where I got it some time back from games with gold, but never had played it; the version I'd previously tried was the PC one). I still don't know if I can actually see really getting into this series, but I did at least get past that first boss in the asylum this time, so I actually got to the main world. The controls are so bad in this game! Sure, the graphics are nice, it has a good sense of tension as you explore, you learn what to do and such if you stick with it... but with awful controls (shoulder buttons for attack is a terrible idea!), an often obnoxiously high difficulty level, and no map, this game has problems.
- Sometimes, when you're downloading stuff, it will randomly quit you out of the store for no reason
- The store OS works terribly and, when you go to download something and then back out back to the search list you were just on, will almost never actually leave the title you just downloaded selected. Instead, something far above it will be selected.... usually the very top game in the list. Considering that everything is very slow to navigate and the PS3 demos list is over 500 games long, this is a huge problem, scrolling all the way down every time is really tedious! There isn't any kind of fast-move either, unlike the 360 which lets you scroll by pages with the shoulder buttons. If you want to download a bunch of stuff the PS3 store is barely usable.
- Downloads are really slow. I know I only have the PS3 connected by wi-fi, not wired internet as I have with the 360 (because I only have one cable long enough to go from the router to where my consoles are), but still, all that I've heard about how slow PSN downloading is seems to be true.
- I know I said this before, but it's seriously weird that you need to install things, and those install times are slow for large games.
- Worst of all, the PS3 apparently only supports one save location at a time. So, after I installed the hard drive, it asked me if I wanted to switch the save location over to that. If you say no, the HDD basically doesn't exist and is inaccessible. If you say yes, the 12GB internal flash basically doesn't exist and is inaccessible (unless you remove the hard drive and thus go back to it). That's just insane design! IF you have internal flash and a hard drive, you must allow people to use both sources. The PSP lets you run games off of the disc or out of the flashdrive menu, and the X360 allows you to save and load from the internal flash, hard drive, or, for save files, cloud saves... and it now even has 2TB external hard drive support too, though this was only added this year and surely would be slow considering that the 360 doesn't have USB 3.0. But anyway, on PS3, you have none of that, only "only the HDD" or "only the flash". What I've read online about the PS3 not supporting external hard drives at all now makes sense, how could it when it can't even support both its hard drive and what is basically an internal flash drive?
- So, in one positive, the PS3's maximum hard drive size allowed is 1TB, twice the size of the largest hard drive size the X360 supports, 500GB. That's good. However, after transferring over the stuff from the flash memory, before I had downloaded or installed anything else the system said it had only 829 of 919 GBs free! Uh, the internal flash was only 12GB, yes? So why did almost ten times that much space get used up? Sure, I'm unlikely to fill this up anytime soon given that I'm not subscribing to PSN Plus and thus aren't getting all those free game that that have now almost filled up my 360's hard drive, but still, that's kind of weird. Is there some big internal flash thing that it can't access if you have a hard drive plugged in and had to copy over, was this some massive system update, or what? Whatever the explanation, that doesn't make much sense.
On another note, because you were talking about it, I gave Dark Souls another try, this time on the 360 (where I got it some time back from games with gold, but never had played it; the version I'd previously tried was the PC one). I still don't know if I can actually see really getting into this series, but I did at least get past that first boss in the asylum this time, so I actually got to the main world. The controls are so bad in this game! Sure, the graphics are nice, it has a good sense of tension as you explore, you learn what to do and such if you stick with it... but with awful controls (shoulder buttons for attack is a terrible idea!), an often obnoxiously high difficulty level, and no map, this game has problems.