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blu ray – 3 Discs for Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360? – Yahoo! News
Written by Rob Byron on Friday, March 05, 2010 | No Comments
Categories: Blu Ray DVD Releases Tags: blu ray
blu ray – 3 Discs for Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360? – Yahoo! News
3 Discs for Final Fantasy XIII on Xbox 360? – Yahoo! News
I've never understood the hand-wringing over multi-disc games. The original Metal Gear Solid and Square Enix's Chrono Chross were each two disc affairs. Final Fantasy VII shipped on three. Final Fantasy's VIII and IX were four a piece. Even Mistwalker's Lost Odyssey, an Xbox 360 RPG released in early 2008, shipped on four DVDs. Heck, Mass Effect 2 which came out last week, uses two. Complainers? Not to speak of.
Latest case in point: GameFly's preliminary Final Fantasy XIII game description suggests Square Enix's forthcoming RPG opus will be “a three disc game” on the Xbox 360, as opposed to the single Blu-ray disc it'll ship on for PS3 owners.
Time to take a baseball bat to your Xbox 360, then pick up a PS3?
Please.
A couple things. First, Square Enix honchos were saying as much already last year. VG247 broke the story at GamesCom in August, quoting Final Fantasy XIII producer Yoshinori Kitase as saying “We're aiming for about three discs for the Xbox 360 version.” A gazillion blogs picked that up, so GameFly's 'reveal' is only news if you don't already follow the daily tittle-tattle.
Second, who cares? Does disc-swapping impact your play experience? I've been tinkering with the Japanese import version of Final Fantasy XIII (PS3 only) and the game pauses all the time to load cutscenes or new areas, as all games do. Swapping discs a couple times adds a few extra stops to an already peripatetic process. That's it. You might as well grouse about the time it takes to power on your system each time you play.
Third, recall you can dump Xbox 360 discs to the hard drive to mitigate drive noise. While that may or may not mitigate the disc-swapping factor (it'll depend on Square Enix's security requirements) it'll almost certainly speed data access times, eliminating any bottlenecks levied by the DVD drive.
The PS3 version of Final Fantasy XIII installs nothing of consequence to the hard drive, so you're streaming data off the Blu-ray disc as you go. The PS3's Blu-ray drive moves data at roughly 9MB a second. Assuming average latency and seek time, a generic 5400RPM hard drive is still loads faster. If the game has any notable transfer bottlenecks and you're comparing an Xbox 360 hard drive install against data streaming off a PS3 Blu-ray disc, one guess which system's going to be faster.
Connect with Matt on Twitter (@game_on)
Blu-ray: A Primer
by: Kenny Hemphill
Blu-ray is an optical disc format which is set to rival HD-DVD (http://www.the-hdtv-tuner.com/high-definition-dvd.html) in the race to be the de-facto standard storage medium for HDTV. The HD-DVD vs Blu-ray battle resembles that between Betamax and VHS and DVD+RW and DVD-RW.
Currently, the major Hollywood film studios are split evenly in their support fro Blu-ray and HD-DVD, but most of the electronics industry is currently in the Blu-ray camp. The key difference between Blu-ray disc players and recorders and current optical disc technology is that Blu-ray, as its name suggests, uses a blue-violet laser to read and write data rather than a red one. Blue light has a shorter wavelength than red light, and according to the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), which is made up of, amongst others, Sony, Philips, Panasonic, and Pioneer, this means that the laser spot can be focussed with greater precision.
Blu-ray discs have a maximum capacity of 25GB and dual-layer discs can hold up to 50GB – enough for four hours of HDTV. Like HD-DVD, Blue laser discs don’t require a caddy and the players and recorders will be able to play current DVD discs. Codecs supported by Blu-ray include the H.264 MPEG-4 codec which will form part of Apple’s QuickTime 7, and the Windows Media 9 based VC-1.
The BDA says that although blue laser discs and players are already shipping in Japan, they won’t ship in the US until the end of 2005 at the very earliest. It is likely that players will be very expensive initially, compared to DVD players. In Japan, they cost the equivalent of $2000. However, as with all new technology, prices will quickly fall – particularly as Blu-ray will be competing with HD-DVD for that space under your TV.
About The Author
Kenny Hemphill is the editor and publisher of The HDTV Tuner (http://www.the-hdtv-tuner.com) – a guide to the kit, the technology and the programming on HDTV.
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