Since the launch of the PS3, the Official Playstation Magazine has hit
a bit of a slump (though you 360 fanboys could argue that it's the same
for Sony as a whole, but that's irrelevant). Basically, the only real
reason why people picked up the magazine was to play demos...and for
some reason, OPM hasn't latched on. Hell, if the UK one can still do
it, and the Official Xbox Magazine can still do it, then why can't OPM?
Makes more sense to do that instead of crap that people find useless,
like tin covers and Bond sampler Blu-Ray's. But with that being said,
OPM have kinda redeemed themselves in my eyes by actually offering
something remotely useful - a code to download the most downloaded PSN
game of all time, Pain!

To be honest, I was kinda on the fence
about buying it, and getting for free? Well, you can't really say no to
that. So after picking the magazine, I entered my code, got my free
game...that's when all the trouble started.

To begin with, PAIN is a 200MB download. I haven't a problem with that.

After
installing the game, I was greeted with a screen saying that to play
the game, I needed to patch it. That's all well and good - after all, I
knew that the game just got online multiplayer.

When I started
patching the game, it revealed that I needed to download FOUR SEPERATE
PATCHES. I started to get a little miffed. It's not that I don't mind
patching...but four seperate patches? Oh well..

Then I started
to see just how big the patches were. 500-something MB, 111MB, and two
300 something MB patches. Thankfully, each installed after they were
downloaded.

Lost yet?

Here's a quick summary - I
downloaded the initial game, at about 200MB, then I basically
downloaded around 1.1GB worth of patches - which I needed to actually
play the bloody game!

What quickly struck me was just how stupid
the whole ordeal was. I have no issues downloading large filles from
the PSN, yet why wasn't the version of Pain that I downloaded actually
the already up to date game? It'd make a hell of a lot more bloody
sense to actually have just the one file for anyone who already doesn't
own the game, and have the patches for anyone who hasn't updated their
game to the latest version. Honestly, I'd have much preferred the 1.3GB
game as a whole.

I mean, let's take a look at the standard for
any downloadable service - Steam. Once you buy a game from the service
and it starts downloading, you're getting the latest version of the
game. So for the purposes of example, let's say you bought Team
Fortress 2 in the time after the Scout Update. Once it's finished
downloading, the version you have is essentially the latest version of
the game. I'm not going to make any assumptions regarding the Xbox Live
Arcade if it does the same thing, since I know too little about it.
Then again, I'm sure someone reading this will let me know.


Don't get me wrong, it's worth it - since Pain is actually one of the
more feature rich PSN games out there. But it's just kinda dumb that
the version that I had to download wasn't automatically the latest
version of the game. Perhaps this is something that Sony need to look
into...

Still waiting on the go to reveal the big change...

Later.