Hiding load times behind cutscenes and having no load times are very different things. Before I played Uncharted, I read several forum reports that it streamed all level data off the Blu Ray disc. I wasn't sure how that was possible, since even streaming from a hard drive usually causes noticable texture and/or model pop-in problems, but I believed the forum reports anyway. Then when I played the game, the first cave had several lengthy load times. No, they don't switch to a load screen or pause the game with a "Loading" message. I still had to watch a scene where Drake and Sully stand around in a tiny room while a fire slowly lights, a door closes behind them, and then the door in front of them opens. It doesn't take long relative to a typical start-of-level load, but it's quite lengthy when compared to typical mid-level loads. It breaks the flow of the gameplay just like a load screen. "Gameplay, to cutscene, back to gameplay" is a pause in the game when the cutscene serves no real purpose and can't be skipped.

Maybe the rest of the game hides them better, I don't know. I'll buy a PS3 when Final Fantasy XIII comes out if nothing convinces me before that, and I'll play Uncharted all the way through then.

You'll probably read this as a knock against Uncharted. It's not. The little I played of it was fantastic, and the visuals are gorgeous. From what I heard from my friend (the only PS3 owner I know), it only gets better. However, after hearing so much about "no load times", I was disappointed to see what was really happening.

 This is kind of what I'm getting at. Loading off a disc doesn't take much time at all I know, but over time...all those load sequences build up. Eventually over the sequence of the game you might have built up load times that could equal or be greater than that time it took to install to the HDD. Load times from discs are just more tolerable because it doesn't take long at all, and you don't really notice the multitude of load times. Anyway, to me I think it's worth waiting a few minutes to have unnoticable load times from the HDD.

to those saying it would take less space in dvd9, that idea is all wrong, if you move the data to multiple disk the 3d model have to be replicated on every disk, other wise where would the snake model come from when you load data from disk 4? all recurrent 3d models have to be repeated on every disk, that is no the case on blu ray, and since there is an installation there is no reason to repead data on the blu ray cus thats the purpuse of caching on the hdd.

I personally think it's frikkin annoying, and it bothers me that the only reason they're doing it is because a bunch of silly people whined about how much space it's taking on hard-drives -_-. I'd rather just one big install or none what-so-ever :D

Imagine if you will, my predicament for this game, I'm playing it on one PS3, along with 3 other roomates, all on different parts of the game x.x WE HAVE 80 GIGS OF SPACE, LEMME SAVE IT ALL >_E

@ chronotrigger, think of those with only 20GB!

With Uncharted and others (call of duty 3 I beleive) that hide the loading with cut scenes, but I am not sure about Uncharted doing that, because there are rarely cut-scenes, and you can get some quite long gameplay sessions without any breaks. I have no problem with that, so long as the cut-scene does contribute to the story, and when you retry you don't have to watch the cut-scene again.

As for those with long elevators (Jak 3 is the one I remember) those are okay so long as they are not like 5 minute lifts, and they do make arcitectural sense

While I will admit that a bunch of 8 minute installs is much less convenient than swapping discs once taking a total of 10 seconds during the entirety of the game, I will only say that Kojima had to do this as a last resort when he couldn't understand the power of the Cell.

He obviously didn't want to make an experience that's very, very inferior to a single disc swap. Or even 100 disc swaps.

@ thebigfatj, they are only like 2-3 mins long

Is it possible to create and play a PS3 game on a DVD?

@Munkeh, Uncharted didn't even load during cutscenes, I attempted to uncover a truth, but every time a cutscene would come up in my second playthrough I'd quickly skip it only to find an instantaneous resumption of gameplay xD Uncharted used some amazing streaming techniques.

 Ah, I didn't think it did, but others were accusing it of that