home consoles media

[missioncontrol]

Just curious, which type of media would you prefer your games to come in...

Let's say the playing field was even as far as capacity for each, would you prefer your home consoles to use cartridges or CDs or other?

If other then list it...

[Loki]

Cartridges for sure.
They are sturdy and fast loading... of course it's a nostalgic thing too.

I once got a crack in an xbox game when I got it out of the box, even when I handle them very well.
I also have a playstation game that doesn't work anymore even though it doesn't have a single scratch.
Burned CD's also don't last very long.

Cartridges on the other hand never stopped failing.

[missioncontrol]

Yep I rarely find a cart that doesn't work after a bit of cleaning

[pointdablame]

Cartridges.  I grew up with them and they say "game" more than a CD/DVD does in my mind.  That is of course, using your assumptions about capacity or price.  I've grown to accept DVD as a medium because of its positives, but there's something about using an older cartridge that is just more fun.

[ChadTower]

Frankly, I'm hoping they start coming on flash media soon.  With the cost of games staying steady and the cost of large media coming down, I think that will be the best of all worlds.  No load times - you'd be able to update the game itself as well as keep the saves on the game medium - and it would encourage developers to make gameplay more important than 3gig of cinemas again.

I prefer cartridges of the formats so far basically because of no load times.  DVDs are cheaper to make, obviously, and better for storing a lot of them, but they are also way too fragile and load times annoy me.

[leapinlew]

Frankly, I'm hoping they start coming on flash media soon.  With the cost of games staying steady and the cost of large media coming down, I think that will be the best of all worlds.  No load times - you'd be able to update the game itself as well as keep the saves on the game medium - and it would encourage developers to make gameplay more important than 3gig of cinemas again.

I prefer cartridges of the formats so far basically because of no load times.  DVDs are cheaper to make, obviously, and better for storing a lot of them, but they are also way too fragile and load times annoy me.

I agree. Bring on flash media...

I didn't purchase the Sega CD or the PS1 because of load times. It's a shame there wasn't more of an outcry against those load times. I remember checking out a PS1 game that let you play a Galaga type game while the actual game was loading up...

[pointdablame]

Frankly, I'm hoping they start coming on flash media soon.  With the cost of games staying steady and the cost of large media coming down, I think that will be the best of all worlds.  No load times - you'd be able to update the game itself as well as keep the saves on the game medium - and it would encourage developers to make gameplay more important than 3gig of cinemas again.

I prefer cartridges of the formats so far basically because of no load times.  DVDs are cheaper to make, obviously, and better for storing a lot of them, but they are also way too fragile and load times annoy me.

I agree. Bring on flash media...

I didn't purchase the Sega CD or the PS1 because of load times. It's a shame there wasn't more of an outcry against those load times. I remember checking out a PS1 game that let you play a Galaga type game while the actual game was loading up...

I think that might have been Ridge Racer.

[Tahnok]

[...]
Let's say the playing field was even as far as capacity for each, would you prefer your home consoles to use cartridges or CDs or other?
[...]

If you even out the playing field regarding storage capacity, then cartridges may have the advantage. However, carts just can't hold as much data as CDs. And, while I don't think capacity is everything (I'm not a big fan of the PS3's expensive blue ray), I think the jump between carts and CDs is big enough to justify it. Not only that, but CDs are cheaper and developers have gotten pretty good at hiding the loading times.

I love carts, there's nothing quite like loading one up. But the pure practicality of CDs gets my vote.

Edit: Fixed little error...

[AlanS17]

I've never had optical media fail me when I took care of it. I've only had bad discs when I treated them like crap. Maybe I'm just used to load times. They don't bother me.

When it costs $1 to put a game on a disc and probably $20+ to put a comparable game on a cart, it's a no-brainer what the publishers will use. Can't blame them, either. Plus mass-duplicating is easier on optical media.

My vote is for optical media. I've had carts fail, and no amount of cleaning ever brought them back.

[missioncontrol]

[...]
Let's say the playing field was even as far as capacity for each, would you prefer your home consoles to use cartridges or CDs or other?
[...]

If you even out the playing field regarding storage capacity, then cartridges may have the advantage. However, carts just can't hold as much data as carts.

I'm guessing you meant CD for one of those....

THe reason why I was referring to an even play field as far of capacity, I was thinking on the lines as Chad by using flash media in replace of carts since it would still essentially be the same concept....

[shmokes]

Optical media opens up vast possibilities for pirating, which is nice.  Also, capacity kills cartridges.  Imagine a masterpiece like Resident Evil 5 or the expansive worlds of Grand Theft Auto or Oblivion on cartridges.  Not possible.  Plus optical media brought the price of games down quite a bit.  And load times are manageable.  A lot of companies, such as Retro, with the Metroid Prime series, have eliminated load times altogether using clever data streaming tricks.  Minor load times aren't a big deal, but are largely unnecessary.  Bad load times are just the product of lazy/unskilled developers.

The flash media idea definitely has a lot going for it.  Already you can get near single-layer DVD capacities pretty cheap.  By the time the next round of consoles comes out five years from now, flash media will be totally ready for prime time.  HD-DVD capacities will probably be available for $20 or less.  It's very likely that's what the next consoles will use if they aren't using 100% downloadable content by then, eschewing physical media altogether.

[Howard_Casto]

Bad load times maybe, but the ultimate goal should be NO load times, which I don't see anyone doing yet. 

Optical media has unavoidable flaw in that you can only read data off of it as fast as you can spin it.  Since they are trying to cram more and more data on the same sized disc, eventually load times will get longer and longer. 

Solution:  Solid state harddrives (or thumb drives).  They are cheaper than carts, and have no loading time while remaining small in size and durable at the same time.  Unfortunately atm usb 2.0's slowness is holding them back.  A new port would have to be accepted. 

With that being said, SD memory seems to be taking over as a storage format.  It simply isn't acceptable for larger games though because it is so costly. 

[RecycledPast]

Didn't the TG-16 and SMS use cards for their games?  I haven't used either one in years so I don't remember the load times.  I remember thinking how cool they(the games) were because they were very thin and small.

[AlanS17]

Right now, you can get a 4GB CF card for as low as $35. While that seems cheap considering they used to be $350+, they need to get down around $3.50 before they're considered viable.

[ChadTower]

Guarantee them 20 million annual units sold and they will be.  Today.  It's all about the economics of scale and business motivation.

[DarkBubble]

It's a tough call for me.  I started with the 2600 and loved cartridges.  I hated load times of CDs, but CD audio and FMVs were pretty much limited to that format until newer technologies came about.  I go back and play through my Sega CD and PS1 games and the load times of some games don't seem anywhere near what I remember.  Maybe it's the really long load times of some modern games that have changed my perspective, maybe it's just this ungodly level of patience I seemed to have developed, I dunno.

I've been impressed with what's been pulled off with cartridge-based media in recent years, but overall, I'd almost rather stick with CD/DVD media.

[shmokes]

For what it's worth, solid state media, thumb drives, SD cars, etc, do have transfer rates.  Levels would still need to be loaded into RAM, etc.  I don't know enough about the transfer rate to know if it is so fast as to be negligible for videogame purposes, but I know that some of these mod cartdridges for the Nintendo DS suggest that you only buy the highest quality, fastest microSD cards because otherwise you will experience slowdown in your games.  I know that when I transfer large files from a flash drive to a PC and vice versa, I do have to sit there and wait for it to read from and write to the drive.  It's not instantaneous.

Nevertheless, even if the load times stayed exactly the same, and I don't think they would, flash media like SD cards still seem like the best option.  I'm not sure how I feel about purley downloadable games.  I mean, what if I want to bring my copy of Resident Evil 8 to play on my friend's PS4.  Do we really want to lock all our games to a specific machine the way the Virtual Console does with NES games?

[Howard_Casto]

Your right, there is a load time, bt for a video game there shouldn't be.  Assuming they used the exact same "cd loading code" for say a thumb drive the load would be so instantanious that you'd get a blank screen and then it'd be done.  Now I've also noticed that sd is noticeably slower than whatever type of flash memory they use in thumb drives.  As I said though, it seems to be the standard atm wheather we like it or not and it isn't THAT slow.  At least not as slow as loading it from a blueray/hddvd drive would be.


I want to point out that I didn't mean downloading games, I meant buying games on said media.  If the media isn't re-writeable it would probably be faster and it isn't like they wouldn't "lock" downloads like you were saying.

[Tahnok]

If you're considering flash cards to be in the same category as carts, then yeah, I change my vote to carts. Solid state memory is cheaper all the time. And, with the development of these new cards capable of holding 32 gigs, size isn't really a problem. It seems like the perfect solution. Small, cheap, fast, and large storage capacity. Unfortunately, I just don't see it happening anytime soon, especially since companies are pushing high capacity disk technology.

[shmokes]

I want to point out that I didn't mean downloading games, I meant buying games on said media.  If the media isn't re-writeable it would probably be faster and it isn't like they wouldn't "lock" downloads like you were saying.

Oh yeah . . . I knew what you meant.  I was just throwing that out there cos earlier I had said that I thought flash media was pretty likely for the next generation if the consoles didn't go with a purely digital delivery system (i.e. downloadable games).  I know that Bill Gates has suggested that 360 will be their last console that uses physical media.  So, yeah, it sounds nice and futuristic, and all, but I'm just not sure how much I like it.  I want my games to be portable and I want to be able to sell/give them to other people when I'm done with them.