What the fuck is wrong with Sony?
I like video games. I hate Microsoft. Of the last gen consoles, I was a big PS2 fan, which wasn’t hard, the PS2 was awesome and had all the great games. The Gamecube basically sucked, other than Zelda, even the Mario game, Sunshine or whatever the fuck it was, sucked monkey balls. The xbox tried to come onto the scene with features like a hard drive, which was good, and downloadable patches, which i figured would make game developers make even lazier. I refused to even play it, so high was I on my stupid fanboy high horse.
Then the next wave of consoles. The Wii was basically unattainable, and didn’t have anything to appeal to me anyway. The PS3 was friggin expensive, so that left the xbox. I wasn’t really playing a lot of video games anyway, so it wasn’t a big deal. My brother had gotten a 360, so I used to watch him play Gears of War, and yea, the graphics were pretty friggin good, but I just can’t get into many FPS games. Go here, shoot these 10 aliens in the face, then maybe if its a “good” FPS, you’ll flip a switch. Joy. But that’s a rant for another time.
So one day, he brings home this stupid looking little guitar, and the now ubiquitious Guitar Hero 2. This was my first experience with the 360 and rythym games in general, and I was hooked. At first I was no good, like most people, but soon I was taking on all comers. I still couldn’t beat most songs on Hard, but who cares, its fun.
Fast forward to a year ago. I move into a new pad, get myself a nice HD Television, lots of speakers, and decide, time for some Guitar Hero action. Due to unforseen circumstances (read: them actually having one in stock) I got a Wii as well. I looked like a retard walking home with all my consoles. A retard with a lot of disposable income.
Fast forward even further-er (try to keep up, I know I bounce around like a butterfly on crack; deal with it) and the release of Metal Gear Solid 4. I have loved the Metal Gear games since the first one on the NES, and the solid series is so good, I just bought MGS1 on ebay and will probably play through them all again. Still, Sony FINALLY managed to actually keep an exclusive on their system, so I had to get a PS3. I shopped around for the bundle, but it wasn’t easy to find, so I just went out and got a 40gb PS3 and forwent the downwards compatible PS2 support. (I also just got rid of both my PS2s. Yes, I had two).
So I get the beast home, damn its big. I hook it up, HDMI-style, and am ready to go. After hooking it up to my wireless, which was a pain, but hey, you only do it once. Hopefully. Then it needs a system update. Fine. Then I play the game. Hooray! Much ink has been spilled on MGS4, and if you like Metal Gear’s, or interactive movies, you’ll love it. If not, you won’t. So save your pennies for GTA4 DLC on your xbox or whatever gay FPS shooter comes out next.
My problem is not with the game itself, its, well basically, loading screens. Loading screens suck. Microsoft is, supposedly, going to allow you to copy games to the HD on the 360, and I had something similar for my HD’d PS2, which helped a lot. Sony and MGS decided, they will do something similar, where when you first load the game, it must “load” into the hard drive. This takes like 10 minutes and you get to watch snake smoke. Then whats the VERY NEXT SCREEN after you push start? You guessed, it “loading”. Then you get to repeat this process after every chapter, although its shorter.
So, I beat the game, its fun, and I decide to start a new one, since you can get extra stuff, and hey, it was a fun game. I start over, and whats the next screen? LOADING. Words cannot contain my joy. Regular words anyway, curse words might come close.
After that bullshit, I decide to play around in Sony’s store. Microsoft actually has this right for a change, their store is just another section of the ‘blade’ interface. Its basically built-in. With Sony, you’re executing an application, the difference is subtle, but it makes all the difference. And yes, I know, navigating through all of the Xbox content can be a pain. Suck it up, it could be much worse …
Trying to download a ‘theme’ for my kind of ugly default PS3 background, it tells me it won’t do it in the background, and to apply I need only go through the follow option, 35 minutes deep on the XMB …
Wait. What the fuck?
On the xbox, you download a theme, you hit ‘apply’ and it applies, amazingly. If you sat and wanted for a game to download, you can play it immediately. This is horseshit from some giant Budweiser horse.
So then I download a game demo. It DOES download in the background, but sony has some weird shopping cart interface going on here, and instead of downloading the second demo I had queued up, it … didn’t. Not sure why. Maybe I didn’t hit left trigger, whoops, I mean L2 when I clicked the download.
So lets play this game? Oh right, gotta exit the store. Find the stupid game, hiding below metal gear, and run it. Nope. Its got to install. What the fuck are you installing! I downloaded it, was it compressed? Is there some background process clicking ‘next’ over and over again? Yes, thats a fucking Windows joke. I’m making Windows jokes about Sony …
And that long meandering rant leads to my point. Sony has some released the Windows Vista of consoles. Its sort of familiar, everything works, just worse. I don’t understand how you make a worse interface than MICROSOFT? These guys brought us MS-BOB, Windows Millennium, and the current turd, Vista. Maybe its because you stole the PS3 interface from the PSP, itself a best seller. Either way, its ponderous. Fucking ponderous.
Leave a Reply