I like the idea of "insert & play",so i`m pretending i have a Wii and swap a disc every 10-15 hours. Burns a lot of calories and keeps me healthy.

It depends on the game and how it handles things.

In the ps1 game "legend of dragoon", when you revisited old towns after progressing far into the game, you had to insert disk 1. When you went back on your story quest, you had to switch back to disk 3. When you completed some sidequest for another old town you had to switch to disk 2 to return there...and so on. This was a case of extremely annoying disk swapping. Town data is too huge to put on one disk so it was basically ineveitable. In ffviii, on getting to disk 4, you couldn't return to old towns anymore because you so called went through a time-warp but the truth is it's because of disk space.


For installs, the only one that has annoyed me is yes: MGS4. I don't mind a 50 gb 24 hour install ONCE. There's the keyword : ONCE. Having to install over and over again is annoying. I have a 320gb ps3 so I don't care about the installation size or time because I can do other things while it installs.

I realize the mgs4 install fiasco was sony's fault for setting a limit on install size. I wish in the future there won't be any installation limits only optional installations if possible like SC4 and NG:Sigma. Those who prefer slow games to save space would be happy and those who just don't mind going through the one-time pain for an infinitely faster game would be happy as well

Install are less annoying if it's once for the game and never have to do it again but in MGS4 the one install per act got really annoying.

Even moreso because my brother was also playing the game and since I was always about one act ahead of him, we had to reinstall the acts every goddamn time we loaded our game. In this case, I would have much preferred just switching discs.

Both are sucky, i prefer to swap disks, thats just me tho, hopefully when sony do the slim ps3 they put a faster drive in it, so maybe you wont need to install it

I am appalled at these responses. People are, "annoyed" by having to swap disk? Man, I enjoy getting to a good plot, only to have it thickened by a disk swap intermission. It gave me a chance to reflect (as long as I needed) and it kept me immersed. There is something thrilling about the disk swap that cannot be replaced. I remember Star Ocean the second story so vividly because at key moments, I had a chance to talk with my brother about what we just saw, what we thought would happen next, and if the next disk will be as long as the previous disk.

To me, disk swapping is magical when used properly.

On thee other hand, installs are not bad either. They can help stability in graphic engines, speed game play, and reduce load times. I like all of those benefits as much as I love thee intensity of a well timed disk swap.

Both suck? No, no! Both are great. Both have great upside. I am a little shocked at all of the poor attitude about two things that are trivial and not necessarily negative. Wow gamers. I frown upon you all with moonlight!

I don't really care because both have their ups and downs. On the one hand, /i don't want to have to wait 10-20 min to play my new game, but I also don't want to have to worry about losing a disc and/or damaging it while I'm taking them in and out of the machine. Give me Uncharted...

It depends. If you have a large game collection, Mnditory installs are murder, as your hard drive space is quickly filled, if you casually play games, disk swapping is worse, as you have to break the game play flow to swap out a disk, when you would only have to do a preliminary install otherwise.

From an artistic viewpoint, swapping disks is much worse. It breaks the suspension of disbelief and pulls the player back out from the gaming world. From a practical viewpoint, installs are worse. Swapping disks provides for a virtually unlimited expansion, where installs are constrained by hard drive space.

I would prefer swapping disks if I had to chose, but ideally, we need a 1 TB cartridge format :)

After so many years of playing PC games where both are present, I can safely say... swapping discs is worse.

I have No-CD cracks for pretty much every PC game I own.  I can play every game straight off my hard drive without ever having to swap a disc beyond that very first install.  It's beautiful.  ^_^

 *GASP* I am reporting you to the FBI!

Any who, PC gaming and Console gaming are very different in this area.  While I agree 100% with you from a PC gaming stand point, The extensibility of Hard Drives in a PC make storage a much smaller issue.  If you have a 40 GB Hard Drive with a 20 game library, each needing to dump a gig and a half on the drive, you are gonna run out of space real quick.

umm... the PS3 says "hi."