Keep going fast with no load times for Ridge Racer 7!
by Nick Doerr 
{ Nov 6th 2006 at 7:30PM }
Fast, fast, fast... fast cars, fast food... fast load times? Whaaat? How about no load times? Yeah, right! Right? Wrong. The PS3 makes a fantastic idea come to life with the announcement that Riiiiiiidge Racer 7 can be loaded completely and neatly onto your hard drive. That means absolutely no waiting to get your race on. How hot is that? To quote the producer of the game, "This is not necessary in order to play the game...you can have everything read off of the Blu-ray disc. It's just an optional user-friendly feature, because when you want to race, you don't want to wait!" So no worries mate, if you'd rather keep that hard-drive space for something other than an entire game, you can.What we want to know is this: will this become a normal feature? Will we be able to load an entire game onto our hard-drive, eliminate load times, and erase it (but not the save!) when we finish it up? Perhaps that's part of why Sony has been addicted to finding security features to prevent copying, etc. Personally, this sounds like a great idea. Sure, you can only have a few games at once on the drive, but it's easy to pick the ones you'll play the most (be it online or otherwise) and leave 'em sit on the PS3. This should be an option for every PS3 game. How is it a bad idea? Oh yeah... storing the game, then selling the disc back as used. But is that bad? You already paid for the game and if you run out of space and delete it -- your loss. Although it does make those next-gen game prices a little bit better. Give us your thoughts on this issue, we're really curious to see your take!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Caramella Bongo ... how are you today? @ Nov 6th 2006 7:36PM
You still need the disc in the drive to play.
Does RR7 load the entire game onto the HDD, or just portions of it?
Sexington Feele @ Nov 6th 2006 7:44PM
Wait, so I can rent a game say at blockbuster and download it to the hard drive.But I think you should still need the blue-ray to boot up? If not sweet.
gordynyc @ Nov 6th 2006 8:18PM
Here's my question...How many games do you play at once? I normally play 2 to 3 games a month at the most. I am sure that even the 20gb PS3 will suffice.
How many people are being paid to post negative crap about SONY? Let's get real people.
The PS3 is fucking AWESOME!
How many great games are coming out for the Wii, xbox360? I count 1.
Wii: Zelda.
XBOX360: Gears.
PS3: Resistance, Motorstorm, Ridge Racer, Virtua Fighter, Tekken...All with great new grahics, gameplay, online multiplayer...This is a great time 2 be alive!!!
GamerGuyX @ Nov 6th 2006 8:32PM
Native 1080p visuals and no load times. Excellent.
Ed @ Nov 6th 2006 10:26PM
I think this is a very good option, but the problem is, like you said, this can lead to people just storing there game on there hard drive and then selling them. Lets see how Sony manages to handle this.
Thaylin @ Nov 6th 2006 10:33PM
This is a fantastic idea! It should definitely be a standard feature with all PS3 games, and movies....Eh Why not?
belcho @ Nov 6th 2006 10:34PM
No way, you'll have to have the disc to play the game. Still, if you can eliminate the load times, it'll be great. But, will all games use it?
Brad Hodson @ Nov 6th 2006 10:36PM
Yeah, it would make sense that the disc would have to be in the drive to play.
Otherwise, you could go down to the rental store, pick up a few games, copy 'em to the good ole HDD and get away with only paying $5 for any game.
This could be a fantastic feature for games to come.
Algernon @ Nov 6th 2006 11:13PM
Most likely you will still need the disc in the PS3 to play the game. I doubt sony wouldnt think of that already, otherwise you can just get yourself a external HD and have all your games and all your friends games on it.
Although its a cool idea... load times suck when youve got some momentum going
go eat your fries biotch @ Nov 6th 2006 11:33PM
Seriously i dont want trolls coming in here talking major shit alright, piss off.
lupe @ Nov 6th 2006 11:50PM
Isn't it true that you want the load times to go down, you need to dump 5Gb on the HDD? If you want faster load times, you need to dump 4-5GB on the the HDD in which it takes about 9 or so minutes to do.
Genji has this, so instead of 19 seconds of load times, you can have it at 4 seconds of load times with that 9 minutes dumping thing. ..... things to do while waiting for things.
Pipe @ Nov 7th 2006 12:06AM
@3. Great time to be alive... sure if you got the money
Altodarknight @ Nov 7th 2006 12:35AM
I'm sorry, I am a fan of the PS3, but this is ridiculous.
It is a cold hard fact that the blu ray drive in the PS3 is x2 speed, really slow. Now to say that dumping the entire game, which in this case is under 6 gig (so much for blu ray), which will take around 10 minutes. So there is a large load time. Then you still have to load data from the HDD to the RAM which is much faster than Disc to RAM, but still a load time. Also, if you take 3 games, each 6 gig, you have filled your 20 gig HDD. If you play a 4th, then when you play the game that was wiped to fit on the 4th game, you have to spend 10 minutes loading the game again. What if it is resistance, it wont even fit on the 20 gig HDD and wil take 45 mintues to dump on the 60 gig HDD. This is just trying to put a positive spin on the consoles weakness.
Also gordynyc, keep your moronic statements to yourself. There are many great games on all systems, many better than those listed on your list of the PS3 games.
Graphics, online play are on all systems as well, with graphics being the same on 360.
Also, hate to break it to you but gameplay isn't normally a touted feature of a console (hint: every game has it, hence GAMEplay)
Aex @ Nov 7th 2006 2:20AM
@Pipe
Welcome to America :)
Matt @ Nov 7th 2006 3:11AM
Blu-Ray, huge capacity, shit ass transfer rates.
Glenn @ Nov 7th 2006 3:33AM
Altough im totally not into PS3, I do think that this is a very good move, becouse they have enough hard drive space (on the big hard-drive ps3 version) so why not? It would be awsome if you wouldn't need the disc to play it afterwords, becouse disc's can break, disc's you have to put in time after time...
Good job Sony (And that while Im a BIG Xbox360 FANBOY, doesn't that mean something :P?)
Greetings Glenn
Foppe @ Nov 7th 2006 3:48AM
Was´nt this confirmed a long time ago?
Let the game install 9 GB data on your harddrive to make it load faster.
Kazsucksmyballs @ Nov 7th 2006 3:59AM
Perfect feature , a small bug in the firmware (is the PSP UI hahahaha!) and we will be able to rent/download and upload into the HDD , yes , i might buy a PS3 after all , but will never buy it games wooohooo!
ihavenoideawhatisgoingon @ Nov 7th 2006 6:28AM
but... this hard drive is smaller than a Blu-Ray disk. How is that going to be possible with games. I thought that they needed all 25 gig of the blu-ray to fit the games because they are so huge!! does this mean that all that 1080p in ridge racer would fit on a single layer DVD!! I think I've been had by this blu-ray madness!!
Oh well...Hopefully the Resistance install will only be like, 5 or so gig, and not the however big they're now saying it is!! That'd suck if i had to install all of the other languages!
Foppz @ Nov 7th 2006 6:58AM
Was´nt this on joystiq some month ago?
Sponge @ Nov 7th 2006 8:18AM
Gordynyc, taking something positive about the PS3 and turning it into such an blatant fanboy attack on the other two will bring out the fanboys in full force.
Jonikiro @ Nov 7th 2006 9:49AM
So what, does this mean that the Blu-Ray is slower than molasses? It needs the HD just to bring it up to speed with everything else? I'm a PS3 fanatic just like anyone else, but this feels like I'm going to have to pay for the 60GB HD just because the Disc takes too long to load from.
Trogdor @ Nov 7th 2006 10:18AM
In one fail swoop Sony has just made it clear that the BluRay drive was not necessary. If you could load each game on the hard drive they could easily ship any games that are too large on two disks (one install disc and one play disc) that would give you 18GB of space to use for the game (DVD9 X 2) and would have cut the cost of unit.
turkey @ Nov 7th 2006 11:50AM
Its a clever idea, and a needed one going by the load time seen so far, check out the clip on how "silent" the ps3 is, it takes over 1min for the game to boot, and it does not look like its doing FMV... no wonder they want to cache to the HDD.
gordynyc @ Nov 7th 2006 1:01PM
"@3. Great time to be alive... sure if you got the money"
Come on already with the money thing! If you have 399.00 for an XBOX360 then save an extra month or two and get a PS3 for the extra 100.00 bucks.
Jack Ward @ Nov 7th 2006 3:22PM
Think about online play, anyone who hasn't loaded the game to their HD is going to cause all other players in the party to wait whilst the level loads on their console. Whoops!. I admit this is the future but hiccups like this send the problem back to square one
gordynyc @ Nov 7th 2006 4:42PM
In case you missed it, Altodarknight, the name of this website is ps3fanboy
Thomas @ Nov 7th 2006 10:13PM
I love the idea, but maybe Sony will put something in place, like a disc verification.(thus the ps3 has to read the disc to access the downloaded game content) Piracy isn't good at this point and time for the system. The premise of the feature is to improve load times, not to allow you to take your collection on the road.
Chris @ Nov 8th 2006 7:35AM
Anyone who thinks that Sony are going to let you rent games and keep playing them after you have returned the disc needs to book a return ticket out of Disney Land.
Patukka @ Nov 8th 2006 8:20AM
Ok so i can install games on my hard drive... WIPII I PAYED 200 EXTRA FOR NOTHING BECAUSE BLU-RAY JUST BECAME USELESS. What kind of tools do Sony have in their company to first tell people how important the size of blu-ray is and then come up with this?
Ciaran Gallagher @ Nov 13th 2006 1:04PM
cool. I'm not usually bothered if load times are short but NO load times. That is good. Now I see the advantages of all the unnecessary expensive stuff on PS3.