With the recent spat between Game and EA I thought it be prudent to cash in my GAME points! Looking on their website, I found a bargain, Gran Turismo 5, and best of all it was free with my points.

When I returned home late from a recent business trip away, the game was waiting for me on my doormat. Great, I can kick back with a beer, put on the 3D TV and race a few circuits.

The PS3 informed me that a new firmware was available and an update was required. Thirty-five minutes later, firmware 4.11 was finally installed and running. With the first beer down it was time for some Turismo action! Popping in the game disk, it advises that it needs to install 1gb of data to my hard drive, another ten minutes pass by, the installation is complete, finally time to play!

Its nearly an hour now, and finally I get to click the play button on Turismo 5.

Now considering the disk is from the platinum range, which usually means this is the final cut of code, I was surprised to be greated with a screen advising that a mandatory update is required, it also just so happened, that the download is about the same size as the install 1gb. I don’t have a particularly slow Internet connection speed, and a gb usually downloads in about 30 minutes.

A couple more beers and an episode of Burn Notice, and the game is only at 40% downloading update 1 of 6! At this point it’s way past my bed time and I give up. No racing for me this evening!

It’s now Saturday lunchtime, after restarting the update process this morning and after two and a half hours the updates are finally complete! Surely I get to play my new game now?

Apparently not… The game now needs to install 8gb onto my hard drive, that’ll be another 30 minutes away you can be sure.

I’m left questioning, who is being entertained by the PS3? It’s certainly not me! Whilst there’s always friendly rivalry between Xbox and PS3 owners, when it comes to entertainment and playability, the Xbox wins hands down every time. It would be much better that if these updates are necessary, they run in the background freeing up the box to enable you to play other games or watch a movie…

My only objective was to unwind after a long week with beer and a racing game, once again I was thwarted by Sony, so I settled for beer and watching a progress bar slowly move across the screen 😦

Sony can learn a lot from Microsoft’s gaming model. Upgrading their networks to not throttle downloads, use the delta patch methodology to reduce the patch size and download time, give you the ability to play the game offline if you don’t want to accept the most recent update. At least Xbox Live Silver (Free) doesn’t suffer these issues so why would I pay Sony another £40 a year for its plus network that delivers what should be the basic level of service out of the box. To me the PS3 is just a cheap 3D Blu-Ray player!

Long live the Xbox the true entertainment system.