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PlayStation (Games) Role Playing (Games) Entertainment Games

Final Fantasy XI-Bundled PS2 Hard Disc Explored 46

Posted by simoniker from the moogle-boondoggle dept.
Thanks to IGN PS2 for its article discussing a hands-on look at the U.S. PlayStation 2 hard drive, bundled with Final Fantasy XI, which launches on March 23rd for $99. The article notes: "What's the big deal? ...well, let's just say that the Network Adaptor was the first step for players to get online, and the HDD is the next step... But in the short run, the HDD really only has one main purpose, which is to get players online playing Square Enix's potentially enormous MMORPG." The drive also comes with other advantages, as it's explained: "Players... can copy data from the (SCPH-10020u) memory card to a folder on the HDD", and it's speculated (although this is unconfirmed), that "SCEA might give gamers the choice to save data with games that require HDD use to either [memory card or HDD].
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Final Fantasy XI-Bundled PS2 Hard Disc Explored More

Final Fantasy XI-Bundled PS2 Hard Disc Explored

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  • PS3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @03:16AM (#8625893)
    I'd be applauding Sony if they decided to support this hard drive with the PS3. It seems rather late in the lifecycle of this system to be releasing such modifying components, so having the ability to carry it over to the next would be great.

    • I was thinking about the same thing myself. Feels like either very few games will take advantage of this, or many games will and people will be forced to make a $99 upgrade. I wonder if games will require the HDD or just take advantage of it. And if they go the second route, will they suffer worse than average load times and stuff because they're really meant to be played from/with help from the HDD?

      Such thoughts aside, I find this a good thing. After all, it's been said that the Xbox 2 will only come wi
      • ehm, well, FFXI requires it. and there are already games mentioned with downloadable content coming out. and with a 40 gig HD i'm sure Sony has some plans.

  • Double check FFXI... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @03:17AM (#8625896)
    A little bird at Sony said that, since the PS2 HD is coming out on the 23rd/24th, and since you get a free month of FFXI, your free period will expire around April 24th. Your next month will run from the 24th until...the 30th?!

    Is Square-Enix serious in charging by "months" as opposed to 30 or 31 day periods? Can anyone shed some light on to rumors that your FFXI subscription is NOT prorated, and therefore subject to a monthly fee for a full....6 days (for that first month, assuming you activate your account at the launch)?

    • Re:Double check FFXI... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Creepy Crawler ( 680178 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @03:36AM (#8625952)
      They may be profit-greedy, but they're not stupid.

      If they charged by a "month", I'd wager that they would not count it if you signed up even 1 day after Month X, Day 1. If you do that, you risk pissing most of your gamers off.

    • Re:Double check FFXI... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When the free month ends (30 days), you are charged only the portion of the current month remaining, not for the entire month.

      Any services activated after the free month is up will be charged for the full month plus an activation charge. So if you want to activate additional characters or Tetra Master, do it early in the month.

    • Re:Double check FFXI... (Score:5, Informative)

      by OnyxRaven ( 9906 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @04:23AM (#8626132) Homepage
      At the end of your free 30 days, you will recieve a bill from S-E prorated from the time of the end of your free period to the next billing cycle. Then its business as usual for that.

      I payed something like $3.21 for my first bill on FFXI.
      • I'll confirm this. That's exactly how it worked for me -- I started playing at the end of November and I paid some small change at the end of December.

        Just my $0.02 for those of you who need a second opinion!

    • Re:Double check FFXI... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      They only bill for time the account is active. You cancel in the middle of the month your'e gonna get a bill for day 1-15, not day 1-30

  • It's a minor nit-pick... (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 21, 2004 @03:19AM (#8625906)
    ...but it releases on the 23rd, not the 30th.
    • Hm, you're right, according to EB, GameTab, and many other sites. I've corrected the summary, since the IGN article (incorrectly) says the 30th - not spectacularly good fact-checking from them, unless the date has been moved very recently.
    • I thought it was the 25th?

      Rats, two less days to level before the PS2 crowd hits the servers and starts asking for power-leveling...

  • Linux Hard Drive; (Score:5, Interesting)

    by polyp2000 ( 444682 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @04:43AM (#8626185) Homepage Journal
    I've had a hard drive [linuxplay.com] in my Playstation 2 for, must be nearly 2 years now. The only question is; will this hard drive be compatible with the linux one; Also , will other games support it? ...ooh and yes does this mean we'll see more unnofficial distro's for ps2 like black rhino etc?

  • Curious (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Lorien6 ( 764000 )
    I wonder if FFXI or the hard drive upgrades will cause problems for anyone with chipped systems... Anyone know?

  • Shame SCEA took out compatibility (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Millbuddah ( 677912 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @05:19AM (#8626267)
    The HDD would be a much better investment for me if more games supported it over here. From what I understand, many games released here have had the HDD save feature removed by SCEA. Anyone know if there's any patches that'll be available so that you can save to the HDD ingame? I know that Xenosaga and many other games had this feature stripped out when they crossed the pond.

    • Re:Shame SCEA took out compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)

      by PKFC ( 580410 ) <pkfc&hotmail,com> on Sunday March 21, 2004 @06:41AM (#8626458)
      Well, Xenosaga still has an HDD.IRX file on the disc. It claims to be a linux package (iirc) and also says that it can read ext2, ext3 and some swap variant. I'm very curious to see if it comes to life upon detecting the HDD or if it was just disabled and left there (talk about lazy).
      • I am fairly certain that the Japanese version of Xenosaga had no use for the HDD in that country (even though they have had the PS2 HDD for quite awhile now.) Thus I doub't Xenosaga will have any use for the device in America or anywhere else, would be nice though.
        • "Xenosaga Episode 1 - Installs to the HDD to decrease load times. Allows you to save your game and load it to and from the HDD directly so that you don't need a memory card. Takes up 1,792 megabytes."

          according to http://www.sscorpio.com/~bungiefan/psbbn_faq.html

          It even had two video files comparing load times with and without HDD support.

  • Game saves (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Masem ( 1171 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @10:18AM (#8626974)
    I don't play on getting FFXI (not very interesting in the MMORPG aspect), but I'm getting very annoyed at the fact that the PS2's memory card feature has not been improved at all. While an 8meg card is good for probably the average PS2 user, I'm trying to juggle cards around to find space for all my saved games; add to the fact that 50% of the PS2 games have no clue about any other memory card slot besides the first one (at least most RPG games recognize this). Even if the HDD was seen as a memory space for games outside of FFXI, you'd still run into problems with games not recognizing that it's there. I'd also love to see a PS2 card that can have a PS1 memory block partitioned off so that I don't have to switch back and forth when going from PS1/PS2 games.

    The GC has a really good-sized mem card option (the 512 block one, yet to fill that for about 20-30 GC games), and the XBox has the hard drive which seems impossible to fill with all the Xbox games out there (and while that's gone in XBox2, the mem solution is much better than the PS2's 8meg card). It's hard to believe that the 8meg card can't be improved to reach 16, 32, or even more memory space without a bit of tweaking. I knwo there's 3rd party solutions, one that I'm using that requires a 8meg card to initialize to the PS2, but this really is something Sony needs to look into, particularly with the PS3 so far off on the horizon, and with games like SOCOM and GTA taking huge chunks of space.

  • Hey, I'd like to welcome all of you PS2 people to our world a little in advance.

    We have worked hard to promote friendship, fairness, and community in our world. Please observe some basic guidelines of etiquette while you enjoy this beautiful world. It's not all "don't"s, so please read and consider carefully.

    1) Don't cheeze. Seriously. That means: Powerleveling, botting (including fishbotting), using cheat utilities, purchasing and selling gil/characters/use of characters/powerlevels from anyone, and the
    • Oh, crap, I'm sorry.. I forgot to end the B tag in point #8.
    • Hear hear.

      the appropriateness and usage of the abbreviation/racial slur "Jap". (It's a degrading racial slur. Ask someone who lived in the USA before 1975, and use another abbreviation. I suggest J, JP, JPN or just typing it out.)

      I've always used the country codes, like .us, .mx, .ca, .jp, etc. Most computer literate people know immediately what I mean and those that aren't that smart usually catch on.

      You don't need a raise before you hit the mid-teen levels. Some would argue higher, but I'm telling
    • One minor quibble RE: point #8...

      Yes, you want to be informed as to the advantages and handicaps of your job/subjob combination... but, in the end, simply play whatever you want. If you want a warrior with a White Mage (which is really not useless, a couple of cures or cure2's can help keep the hate on the tank) then go for it. Learn how to utilize your class to the best of your abilities, you might find some hidden surprises in some combos that make them fun and interesting (although, maybe not the absolu
    • Well, good luck.

      From what I've seen, you could post something similar on just about any MMORPG out there (details altered to fit game specifics of course), it would all be a really good idea for everyone to follow it, and it would still be completely ignored by idiots/griefers.

      But if you don't at least make the effort, then they've already won. So good luck to you.

    • 1) I PL my subjobs all the time. And I also think it'll be difficult for PS2 users to bot, which is good news. It would be impossible to run a seperate program while running the game. 4) I beta tested FFXI for PS2 and it had a name generator built in. Can't remember if the PC version does but you didn't mention it... I desperately encourage this to be used. 5) Hey, that's how economy works. If people want something bad enough to pay whatever you're asking for it, then the demand is obviously that high. I

  • Maybe, probably not (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Artifex ( 18308 ) on Sunday March 21, 2004 @11:44AM (#8627340) Journal
    I'm hardly going to buy an overpriced drive in order to play a game with an additional monthly fee, or worse, throw out the game entirely just because I want the drive. Especially with a Playstation 3 due out in just a couple of cycles that will likely (hopefully, as this is old tech) be incompatible. But I've been interested in adding a drive to my Playstation 2 that games might see (instead of the ones that comes with the incomplete and crippled Linux sets) ever since it was promised, when the console was released, years ago.

    However, according to the article, the utility disc will allow you to format the drive and run diagnostics, etc. Has anyone had experience installing a standard hard drive with the network adapter (standard IDE and molex power in standard spacing, just begging for this) and using the disc to get the drive working?

    Alternatively, has anyone decoded the format and ripped the partition data from one drive to another? (Note to the gathering sharks: again, I'm not interested in copying the MMORPG, which would be understandably illegal. I just want my Playstation 2 to recognize hardware I install to work with games I have paid for.)

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by josh glaser ( 748297 )
    I'll probably just get the PC version, because it's cheaper. But, like any MMORPG, the reason you play it is for community - can anybody who plays FFXI tell me if there is lots of people playing? Thanks!

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Informative)

      by DarthWufei ( 686942 )
      There are tons of people playing, but it really depends on the server. There isn't really a barren server, just don't have many people. I believe Ifrit is one of the servers, but really, there's plenty of people there so you won't slow down any. Though are those huge servers, like the one I'm on, Ragnarok 3k-5k are usually online at a time, just about as many Japanese as English players, so hehe. Oh, and don't forget, if you don't like that server you're on, you can always get a World Pass to join another

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by 602 ( 652745 )
      Around January 1, Square Enix announced that there were 500,000 subscribers. Divided among 20-25 servers, that's about 20,000 players/server. At this moment, on my server, there are 2134 people logged in, which is typical. So, there are plenty of people playing.

      One important point is that the PS2 players are going to need a keyboard. FFXI is a very social game; players will want and need to type to talk to other players.
    • I've been playing the PC version for just over a week now. I'm on the Asura server, and after having just recently played EverQuest, this game world (or maybe just this server) seems almost barren by comparison.

      Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of people all around, but you're not constantly having to push and shove your way around like you're in a subway station at rush hour.

      I'm not a big fan of anime (I like it, just don't LOVE it like a lot of geeks) and some of the in-game stuff is a little too "c

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Informative)

      by djdanlib ( 732853 )
      At off-peak times early in the morning here on the U.S. east coast, there are always at least 3,000 players on my server. Since the U.S. is pretty much 99% asleep then, most of those can only speak Japanese. So your best bet if you want community is to arrange your schedule so you can play well after the U.S. is awake and online - I've heard that evenings are best, but I have not been able to observe this due to my current work schedule.

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