PS3 Fanboy

It's a practice that gained a lot of attention earlier this year with Capcom's Devil May Cry 4: long, hard drive-consuming installations. Since then, we've seen a number of 4-5GB packages end up on our hard drives: DMC, MGS4 ... heck, even Hot Shots Golf. While the practice seems to have subsided just a bit, it appears that the upcoming PS3 version of BioShock is ready to ravage our hard drives yet again.

A recent hands-on by Eurogamer reveals that the upcoming FPS will take up a DVD's worth of data on your drive: 4980MB of data, to be precise. We wish developers would stop forcing mandatory installs, as we feel for those that have 40GB (or even 20GB!) hard drives on their systems. Copying all of a game's data onto the hard drive seems rather lazy, in our eyes. [Reminder: This game originally fit on a single DVD when it released on Xbox 360. The game will not take up significantly more space on a Blu-ray disc.] Copying a small portion of frequently-accessed files and textures onto the hard drive, thereby reducing overall load times and installation needs -- isn't that a better option? Heck, if Uncharted can run without installs, why can't BioShock? Of course, we're not programmers.

[Via Kotaku]

The game hasn't even been released yet and already there's a lot of online controversy over Devil May Cry 4's installation procedure. The game takes around 20 minutes to install about 5 gigabytes of data to your hard drive, during which there's a five-minute looping recap slideshow. Capcom's Chris Kramer responded to CVG with a statement regarding the issue: "If you don't want to watch the 'Previously, on Devil May Cry...' portion of the install process, go make a sandwich and grab a soda, then come on back."

Kramer continues, "Wah! Have you ever played a PC game? At least we aren't making you shuffle multiple discs into a ROM drive, or continuously click 'Yes!' on a series of endless Windows dialog boxes." Wah, indeed! We agree completely with Kramer on this -- a twenty minute long installation sequence is not a big deal. It cuts down on load times, making it load faster than the 360 version despite the slower drive speed. Without the install, players would be complaining about lengthy load times. Which is better? That's a hypothetical question because we already know and, clearly, so does Capcom.