I'm not being a smart ass, you're just complaining about ridiculous crap.

Basically you're just comparing your HD consoles and telling me your gripes about your 360. Which is stupid because the discussion is really about disc swapping. Something being exaggerated as a big issue.

If you own both HD consoles I can understand why you would opt for the PS3 version. But if you only own a 360 the disc swapping isn't a deal breaker at all to experience the same game.

Those games offer a lot more than desert and burned down buildings. Tons of building, caves, and other areas you go in, many hours of dialogue and music, and some FMVs. The point is they've been able too fit a ton of content on a single DVD.

Well 360 has the inconvenience of needing multiple discs sometimes. PS3 has the inconvenience of being more difficult to develop for. Its nice balance annoyances for the developers.

I don't understand the point of your PC vs console analogy.

Multi disc PC games wasn't that big of an issue. Unless its a lot of discs. For example, I own the GOTY edition of UT2004 on CD-Roms. Its 7 discs and installing everything is a huge pain in the ass.

I remember on the PS1 I used to play a FMV game called Psychic Detective. It was 3 discs and it only took 45 minutes to beat. Worst of all you didn't just change discs as you progressed, you actually changed them back and forth every few minutes!

Those are some worst case scenarios in disc swapping. Now lets quit pretending swapping a disc after hours and hours of playing is a big deal.

Nobody is denying PS3 has the advantage of being able to hold significantly more storage on a single disc. But for this gen it hasn't proven to be essential. Spin it anyway you want but it significantly hurt the Playstation brand more than it helped.

Why is this a problem, but mandatory installations are ok? There are more games out there on PS3 that have mandatory installations, compared to multi-disc games on 360.

One forces you to swap out the disc a few times, which takes a  few seconds or a minute if you're slow.

The other forces you to clutter up your HDD and waste several minutes, JUST to try the game. What if you want to go back to a game a few weeks later, but you already deleted the install data? What if the game sucks? You wasted time installing it for nothing, and now have to waste more time deleting it.

I swear these PlayStation extremists will spin anything.

Excellent point a lot of people ignore. Even the PC gamers ignore that huge downloads and installs can be a pain in the ass.

360 is the only HD platform where I can pop in a game and play with very little concern of mandatory installs or huge updates.

Its a good thing PS3 lets you use any hard drive. Because you're far more likely to run out of space.

True, but I got my reasons.

MS ripped me off one time too many. Sony ripped me off only once, a cheap SATA DVD writer that was crap compared to my previous ATA one, always by Sony, and now I got a Samsung one. I used to hate Sony Trinitron monitors and TVs, but then, nobody ever forced me to buy them, while OTOH, I had to buy bad Windows versions twice because they were those available at the moment that supported all my HW and SW, old and new. I had to buy that crappy Works because it was the cheapest way to be eligible to buy a cheaper version of Word (but as soon as WordPerfect offered me more for less, I gave up and WP Suite 8 was my first and last closed source office suite, and I spent less than what I should have paid for Word). I risked my personal data the only time in my life I caught a worm because MS programmed old versions of IE to memorize sensible data in the file "index.dat" even if the user set it to never do it (luckily WinME was so crappy that it crashed as soon as Bugbear infected it). Since then I used IE only to access Windows Update and a pair of online antivirus that once supported only it, and not even Jesus coming back on Earth to recommend it could persuade me to use it for anything else. Add all the efforts MS makes to tie people to its proprietary world where you are given some gadgets for free but you must pay everything essential, and all the filthy stuff it did to destroy competitors and the result is that I can't support it. Obviously neither Sony is a saint and it was good that it was soundly bashed, to tone down its arrrogance, but it's a good thing too that Sony is a competitor big enough to not being easily crushed by MS. About Ninty, I just preferred Mario of the origins, I didn't like the Gameboy, I'm not anymore a platform fan, i prefer sim racers to arcade ones, I don't like region codes and I like to mock Ninty and its fans just a little bit (but it started mostly because some of them feel exaggeratedly depressed whenever Ninty doesn't overkill competition, not to mention some malstromites), but I consider them quite OK overall.

Anyway, to sum it up, I don't trust MS. I don'trust its competitors, either, but MS is the one I trust the least.

You have good points too, when the discs are a few and to be swapped rarely, it isn't a terrible issue (but for example in Lands of Lore III, on PC, once all the worlds were unlocked, traveling for quests was a pain in the arse with 4 CDs to swap quite often and no complete install to HDD option), I don't deny it. But about PS3 and BD, let's not mix things up: Sony initially shot itself in the foot, killing its HW profits for years, but users had a bigger benefit from it just because Sony accepted to pay the bill selling PS3 at a loss to push it and BD. I was referring to users benefit, not Sony one, that is quite arguable as we don't really know how many losses it was ready to suffer to make it win the format war (although it's obvious the losses were a lot higher than its best case scenario). Another thing to not forget about optical disc space usefulness: if I'm not wrong, MS charges extra royalties for games on more than 2 discs, so devs make everything possible to avoid them exceed that space. Anyway, about this issue, it's just natural that extra disc space available becomes more useful as time goes by, and that initially it's less important, this has been good for MS, allowing it to not suffer because of it during XB360 first years. Finally, as I wrote other times, even if I don't trust MS, it's a good thing that it and Ninty soundly bashed Sony when it was becomig too arrogant, this benefitted competitors, SW houses and users, and I think Sony too, in the long term. Just as it's good that Ninty doesn't bury anymore MS and Sony in this part of the current gen, balance is good to cater for as many different gamer tastes as possible.

I was refering just to New Vegas. Textures are reused with aplomb there. The dialog, and music do not take up much space. The FMV's do  though, but if you don't have many of them, like in FFXIII for example, it's ok.

The PC analogy while not perfect, points to the fact that if devs have better hardware/more space, they can and will do "better" stuff with it.

I'm curious what Rage will turn out like. Carmak talked about megatextures where the artists just "paint directly to the world", thus "no two textures being the same". I can easily see how several gigabyte textures will not fit on one DVD, and how artists would prefer to not be bound by any storage limitation. This technology, if/when it will work, will enable people to create even more impressive and better looking environments, which is a good thing.

Now ofcourse,  it's not the end of the workd to have a game on multiple disks, but developers/publishers would prefer to fit their games on one disk, and consumers would prefer to buy games on one disk.

ignore

@Mr Puggsly
You mean to tell me that 360 games do not have updates? Or that for the same game, the updates for the PS3 are (much)larger than the updates for the 360? ...come on...

@PearlJam:

Who's saying that mandatory installs are not an inconvenience? Ideally, games should come on very large disks for drives that have huge read speeds and tiny search times, so that little needs to be installed for the game to work (which can be done transparently), and one can just play things instantly.