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No Hard Drive Bay On PStwo
Thanks to Gamespot for the notification. Sony has confirmed that the PStwo will not feature a hard drive bay. "...consumers who want and use the hard disc drive are typically the more 'hard core' gamers, ... we feel that a majority of those HDD interested consumers already have their PlayStation 2 units."
Because the current PS2 has a hard drive option and people who buy the PStwo (or whatever the hell they call it) might want to play Final Fantasy 11? But they can't. I guarantee this'll bite a few people in the ass... "Mom! I saw Final Fantasy at Bobby's house and it was an MMORPG, can we get it for our PStwo?" kind of situation.
Now if they were announcing the PS3 doesn't have a drive, then you might have a point.
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One other big problem is that the current Playstation 2s are notoriously unreliable. While a user may have already purchased their system as well as the HDD, the odds are fairly good that they will need to replace their system within a few years. If they have to after the release of the PSTwo, there is a good chance that they will not be able to get a replacement that will allow them to use their HDD. Unless they have some form of external drive support, this is a very bad move on Sony's part.
Yes, the Power Glove, Power Pad, and Light Gun were all really well supported... *COUGHBULLSHITCOUGH*
'Standards' in computing only impress those who are impressed by things like 'standards'.
I doubt it's the technology, more so how the save/recall API for memcard stuff is written. I suspect most of the current more-than-8Meg cards out there that are !Sony have hardware hacks that avoid issues many older games have with writing to 8megs, though there's still a few.
Of course, I'd have no problem paying $50-$70 for a 128M storage card for the PS2/two. But to continue to act like 8megs is enough, particularly when most current games have no idea about the 2nd memcard slot, is silly.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
I'm actually really disappointed that console makers aren't embracing the HD idea. A decent drive has a 9-12ms seek time compared to the 150-250ms seek times you see on a DVDrom. As is, far too many games ship with painfully long load times. Now I'll concede that the harddrive isn't a cure-all for that problem (look at Fable) but clever caching techniques could go a long way. Why not have a 20GB harddrive and allocate about half of it for use as system cache? Most people leave a single game in their system for weeks at a time, and if games could copy portions of themselves onto the drive when they wouldn't otherwise be doing work, you could really improve a game's overall feel.
No permanant storage and insufficiant RAM? Who designs these things?
Not a bad idea from their perspective. Right now, only 1 game requires the HDD (FFXI). If I might have missed 1 other game, my point still stands. Other games that USE the HDD can run just fine without it. Other than possible speedups, and possible large gamesave areas, there might not be other use for the HDD. Those two factors are actually not terribly compelling for a HDD. People will still buy games despite not having those features. In return for dropping the HDD, Sony can save a little bit more money on manufacturing. Every tiny 2 cent part adds up to dollars in the end per unit. Finally, Sony can try to do damage control on the HDLOADER fiasco that allows mass-pirating of games on systems that support the HDD. Sony won't lose customers for not including the HDD support. Maybe new FFXI players will have to scrounge old consoles. HDLOADER/ADVANCE users were primarily warez0rs so thats no loss to Sony. Overall, this is a win for Sony. People will still buy this console. I will.
I mean, how are you supposed to refer to this thing if you want to distinguish it from the PS2? Should we call it PS word two and call the PS2 PS number 2? Or maybe we should pronounce it Psstwoh or something like that.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
Well, the thing about 1394 vs. USB for networking is the fact that USB has 5v 500ma current flowing through it. If you do a direct wiring between the two systems you'd create a short and fry the machines very easily. (Anyone who works in PC repair department can tell you that this happened a lot when it was revealed that two usb ports could be used fairly easily for networking. A lot of people went out and bought male-to-male adapters (as opposed to proper routing boxes) and fried their systems. As far as speed is concerned, USB has a peak transfer of 900k/s (On two USB systems) whereas 1394 has a sustained transfer rate of 10mbs (I think the PS2 is an S100, but I'm not near my machine right now.) So speed is NOT on issue at all. Licensing for the PS2 is expensive, but if they gave people a break in pricing it'd be more likely to have these features. Look at new PS2 games, they rountinly come out at $49 and stay there for a while. Pc games come out at $39~29 usually and drop pretty quickly. I can understand not emphasizing this now as the focus is on online gaming. But I want to play games like this with my roommate (Who has a portable TV and an extra PS2.). Not to mention the countless number of College students who have neighbors/roommates in the dorms they could link up with. The biggest weakness consoles have to PC's (aside from graphics/mods) is that it's a lot easier to do network games with PCs. There are some very nice efforts made on the part of consoles, like network support for Mario Kart on the GC. I'm just a guy who thinks Co-op game play gets overlooked too much by companies.