Final Fantasy XI-Bundled PS2 Hard Disc Explored

Thanks to IGN PS2 for its article discussing a hands-on look at the U.S. PlayStation 2 hard drive, bundled with Final Fantasy XI, which launches on March 23rd for $99. The article notes: "What's the big deal? ...well, let's just say that the Network Adaptor was the first step for players to get online, and the HDD is the next step... But in the short run, the HDD really only has one main purpose, which is to get players online playing Square Enix's potentially enormous MMORPG." The drive also comes with other advantages, as it's explained: "Players... can copy data from the (SCPH-10020u) memory card to a folder on the HDD", and it's speculated (although this is unconfirmed), that "SCEA might give gamers the choice to save data with games that require HDD use to either [memory card or HDD].

Comments

PS3

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be applauding Sony if they decided to support this hard drive with the PS3. It seems rather late in the lifecycle of this system to be releasing such modifying components, so having the ability to carry it over to the next would be great.

Double check FFXI...

[Anonymous Coward]

A little bird at Sony said that, since the PS2 HD is coming out on the 23rd/24th, and since you get a free month of FFXI, your free period will expire around April 24th. Your next month will run from the 24th until...the 30th?!

Is Square-Enix serious in charging by "months" as opposed to 30 or 31 day periods? Can anyone shed some light on to rumors that your FFXI subscription is NOT prorated, and therefore subject to a monthly fee for a full....6 days (for that first month, assuming you activate your account at the launch)?

Re:Double check FFXI...

[Creepy Crawler]

They may be profit-greedy, but they're not stupid.

If they charged by a "month", I'd wager that they would not count it if you signed up even 1 day after Month X, Day 1. If you do that, you risk pissing most of your gamers off.

Re:Double check FFXI...

[OnyxRaven]

At the end of your free 30 days, you will recieve a bill from S-E prorated from the time of the end of your free period to the next billing cycle. Then its business as usual for that.

I payed something like $3.21 for my first bill on FFXI.

It's a minor nit-pick...

[Anonymous Coward]

...but it releases on the 23rd, not the 30th.

Linux Hard Drive;

[polyp2000]

I've had a hard drive in my Playstation 2 for, must be nearly 2 years now. The only question is; will this hard drive be compatible with the linux one; Also , will other games support it? ...ooh and yes does this mean we'll see more unnofficial distro's for ps2 like black rhino etc?

Re:Linux Hard Drive;

[Lorien6]

I forget where I saw it, but I do remember reading it somewhere that newer games won't work with the linux harddrive...google it and you're sure to find it, I did it earlier in the week. So I think you're stuck on that point :)

Shame SCEA took out compatibility

[Millbuddah]

The HDD would be a much better investment for me if more games supported it over here. From what I understand, many games released here have had the HDD save feature removed by SCEA. Anyone know if there's any patches that'll be available so that you can save to the HDD ingame? I know that Xenosaga and many other games had this feature stripped out when they crossed the pond.

Re:Shame SCEA took out compatibility

[PKFC]

Well, Xenosaga still has an HDD.IRX file on the disc. It claims to be a linux package (iirc) and also says that it can read ext2, ext3 and some swap variant. I'm very curious to see if it comes to life upon detecting the HDD or if it was just disabled and left there (talk about lazy).

Game saves

[Masem]

I don't play on getting FFXI (not very interesting in the MMORPG aspect), but I'm getting very annoyed at the fact that the PS2's memory card feature has not been improved at all. While an 8meg card is good for probably the average PS2 user, I'm trying to juggle cards around to find space for all my saved games; add to the fact that 50% of the PS2 games have no clue about any other memory card slot besides the first one (at least most RPG games recognize this). Even if the HDD was seen as a memory space for games outside of FFXI, you'd still run into problems with games not recognizing that it's there. I'd also love to see a PS2 card that can have a PS1 memory block partitioned off so that I don't have to switch back and forth when going from PS1/PS2 games.

The GC has a really good-sized mem card option (the 512 block one, yet to fill that for about 20-30 GC games), and the XBox has the hard drive which seems impossible to fill with all the Xbox games out there (and while that's gone in XBox2, the mem solution is much better than the PS2's 8meg card). It's hard to believe that the 8meg card can't be improved to reach 16, 32, or even more memory space without a bit of tweaking. I knwo there's 3rd party solutions, one that I'm using that requires a 8meg card to initialize to the PS2, but this really is something Sony needs to look into, particularly with the PS3 so far off on the horizon, and with games like SOCOM and GTA taking huge chunks of space.