PS3: Legendary Failure

It’s quite stunning how awful the PS3 software really is. Even now, years after launch, basic user interactions are done in so thoughtless and indifferent a manner as to make one wonder what the hell, exactly, they were thinking when they released the stuff.

To take but one example, the one that’s closest to my heart as it’s what is giving me time to write this, game updates on the PS3 are (a) mandatory, (b) unable to be put in the background, and (c) misleadingly, unreasonably slow.

Tonight I put in the disc for “Heavy Rain” hoping to play a bit before bedtime and it immediately began a 1.1G download with no prompt to begin playing unpatched. I’m not sure where the content servers are located but it took about 35 minutes on my normally-quite-zippy 10MBit cable internet connection. The only message as it was downloading said “This download is not able to run in the background.” Why, Lord, why? I wandered off and started to get excited when it got to 95% — but at 100% it then said “Installing update…” and another 15 minute progress bar began. Then, finally, the game loaded and the first thing it did was go into an, again, non-optional, non-interactive installation! This was another 10 minutes, so it was a full hour between putting the disc in and the “Press Start…” prompt. Astounding.

Contrast with Xbox, which permits all downloads to run while you’re doing other things (plus intelligently manages the queue), gives you the option not to take the update (although quite reasonably disallows online play until you patch), and does not require a separate install step after the download. I’m no Microsoft fanboy — hell, I worked there involuntarily and left as soon as I was able — but respect where it’s due, the XBox team got nearly everything about user interaction with the console right.

And Sony, for all of their money and resources, their alien Cell processor technology, and their decades in the console business, got it all completely wrong.