Playing the download game!

Remember the good ol' days when you put a game in and it just played. Blow in that cartridge, slam it into your SNES, hit power and your playing. Things have come a long way since those days: graphics, sound, story, overall design, etc. Games are now bigger and better than ever and the consoles powering them have to be more flexible to accommodate these pixel-pushing, resource hogs. Updates and patches are as common as brushing your teeth these days. Most of these are small and only take a few minutes at the most to download. They are never really an issue with me because I fire up my consoles and play something on them every couple of days. What about the gamers whoare very passive? The ones who play maybe once a week or even less? I think they might see things in a different light.

Recently SOCOM: Confrontation came out. My launch, 60GB PS3 crapped out on me four days before it came out (great timing) so I could not play it. Me and a buddy of mine used to be crazy SOCOM II players, strats, gamebattles, clans, practices, all night "tryout" rooms, the whole deal. We used to rack up hundreds of hours on our profiles and know every intricacy of every map, it was awesome. As time goes on, we have less and less time to play but I thought since my PS3 is broken and his isn't, we should play some dam SOCOM. After I picked up the game and headed over to his place, we pop it in, waiting diligently for our first game. Wait, online is not hooked up, hasn't been for weeks, so we hook it up. FIRMWARE UPDATE, uh ok, this seems standard, about 20 minutes for this and we should be good to go. INSTALLING GAME, oh, I forgot about this. Okay, install the game to reduce load times and make the game run smoother, yadda, yadda, yadda. Another 20 minutes pass and it's game time... not quiet. GAME UPDATE, this is a juicy 400MB+ update that takes over 30 minutes to download, jeez. So after the firmware update, game install, and updating the game, we have enough time to play a couple games.

Now I'm all for keeping the PS3 up to date with the most current firmware and installing games to the HDD to make them run smoother and having updates come out to make online games run better but come on. From popping the game in to actually playing it took over an hour, that's fuckin' crazy. There doesn't seem to be an answer or work around to to this issue yet but something has got to change here. The days of popping in a game and just playing it right away seem to be slipping away and, in the words of my good friend, ". . .[that's] fuckin' bullshit". I totally agree.