Blu Ray Game Views

General Goods

The more storage you have for games the better, right? Well, lets's review the oft-discussed downsides: Blu-ray drives are expensive, but they are also slow. The 2X Blu-ray drive in the PS3 moves data at 9MB a second. Not bad, right? Ito's actually relatively slow. There was some arguing over the speed of the Blu-ray player between Ozymandias and Mark DeLoura, as chronicled here, but they seem to agree that Sonyg's Blu-ray drive is slow:

So there you go: you can either install game assets on the hard drive or place redundant game data around the disc. The problem with both of these solutions is that one of the advantages of Blu-ray become less compelling. Why bother with a large Blu-ray disc when you['re putting that data on the hard drive before you play anyway? You could have simply put that extra information on a DVD and then moved it onto the hard drive. The same can be said about the redundancy approach: why not just use a standard DVD and have it load quickly in the first place instead of doubling or tripling up your data on a slower but larger disc?

The Blu-ray drive is useful for movies, of course, but for gaming, Blu-ray doesnu't look like ito's the best choice until faster drives are released. There is every possibility of a future PS3 revision with a faster Blu-ray drive, but that wona't help current PS3 owners. Blu-ray may be the future for storage thaty's both large and fast, but right now it seems shoe-horned into gaming applications. It seems like developers may actually do better by shipping some of their PS3 games on DVDs. Games will load faster and manufacturers will save money on the discs. Would Sony allow it?

Ramping down the power consumption and, more importantly, the heat the system generates has let Sony tone down the cooling fan. With the Slim, you'll still hear some fan noise if you're close to the unit, but the hum is fainter, and it shouldn't bother you during quieter scenes in movies so long as you're not sitting right next to the PS3. (Fan noise on the previous systems varied wildly; some were noticeably loud, others were all but silent.) We also noticed that after playing a game and Blu-ray Disc for more than an hour, the light breeze the fan emitted was warm but not hot (you can hold your hand up to it without fear of getting scorched).