I’m posting here to call attention to it, as opposed to letting it slide into obscurity: I fucked up calculations regarding memory buses in my GTA IV article. I stand by my conclusions in the article, but I’d prefer to be kept honest. So there it is.
-Aegies
(UPDATE: Sigh. And God damn it. Because Rambus and DDR manufacturers continue to list performance per 400Mhz, My analyses about memory speed are incorrect. I’m leaving them there, because I feel that if I make a mistake like that, the readers should know. I can’t nail people for lack of accountability without holding myself to similar standards. My points stand, however; the 360 holds a significant advantage over the PS3 in the memory department, and this will be more of an issue than storage media this console generation.)
So the new story brewing over the past few days has been the comments in a recent interview between Rockstar Games’ Dan Houser and the Official Playstation Magazine (at least, according to Computer and Videogames, although OPM was dissolved by Ziff-Davis months ago) that have implied that the 360 is holding Grand Theft Auto IV back. In a question that seems more than a little, er, leading, the magazine asks:
“On PS3 you’ve got a guarantee that every machine is going to have a hard-drive and, with Blu-ray, you’ve got plenty of storage, whereas on Xbox 360 there’s no guarantee of a hard-drive and you’re working with the DVD format. Does that create limitations?”
And Houser, having only one answer I suppose, replied:
“Yep.”
It’s kind of like saying “If fire were set to a house, would it be bad?”
Of course, most people seem to ignore his follow up statement: “Both of them have enormous challenges.” That’s an honest answer. Now, discounting the benefits of compression (quicker load times) and cheaper price points, at the very least, the lack of a hard drive is indeed a technical limitation. However, given that the hard drive is usually present, and that other developers have had little problem with the situation (See: Oblivion), it seems like it’s not quite the major issue they’re making it out to be. Not only that, Rockstar has taken to showing the 360 version of the game as opposed to the PS3, so, why might that be? Could it be because the PS3 version isn’t up to snuff? I happen to think so, and I’ll tell you why.