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Posts Tagged ‘playstation’

Playstation Plus

Sunday, April 17th, 2011

When I first saw the Playstation Plus would include online storage, I got excited. I love buying old PS1 games on PSN and playing them both on my PS3 and my PSP. It’s great to be able to take my PSP on a trip or something, play a few hours of Xenogears or whatever, then come home and continue to play it on my console.

The process for doing that, though, sucks. You have to plug (!) the PSP into the PS3 with a USB cable. Then you have to go through some menus, select the relevant save games and copy them. Not the most difficult thing in the world, but it is annoying and tedious. It’s the kind of process that only seriously devoted Sony partisan would call “simple”.

What I’d really like is the ability to designate all save games for game X to be stored online. I tell my PS3 and I tell my PSP, and then it’s just works from now on. Sure, I’d have to make sure that my PSP has a chance to sync up before going somewhere, but that would be a minor nuisance.

So, my hopes were raised when I saw “Online Storage” advertised as a part of Playstation Plus. I don’t currently pay for Plus, but I would do so in a second if they offered this. Sadly, they’re not offering anything that I want. From the Technical Solutions section of their English forums:

PS1,PS2,PSP and minis save data cannot be backed up.

Boo. It gets worse:

You can back up your data to Online Storage as often as you wish, however you may only restore data to your PS3 from online storage once every 24 hours.

This is not such a big deal since PSP/PS1 games can’t be backed up, but would be if they could.

But the absolute worst part, for me:

To backup Save Game Data to Online Storage

 

  • You can back up or copy the save by navigating to the ‘GAME’ icon > scroll through the options until you are on ‘SAVE DATA UTILITY (PS3)’ > Press X
  • Select the save you wish to backup press the triangle button and select ‘COPY’
  • You will be asked to select the destination of the back up save, navigate to the new option ‘ONLINE STORAGE’ and press X to copy over.

 

To restore Save Game Data from Online Storage:

 

  • Go to ‘GAME’ icon, select ‘SAVE DATA UTILITY’ and then ‘ONLINE STORAGE’
  • Highlight the saved data you wish to copy.
  • Press triangle and select ‘COPY’ to retrieve the save.

Why should anyone have to go through that every time? How tedious is that? This really is just a way to back up game saves. It’s the equivalent of plugging in a usb drive and backing up game saves one at a time.

What I was really hoping for was something like Dropbox for PS3/PSP. I don’t want to have to care about individual game save files, whether I’m using a console or a handheld, whether I’ve gone through the proper three-step procedures. What I want is an invisible process where I can save my progress in a PS1 game on my PS3 and pick it up on my PSP without any difficulty.

This seems to be the experience with Sony. They make products with tons of potential then either don’t develop that potential or (even worse) remove functionality down the road. Which is another topic.

Maybe the audience for this sort of feature is small. I don’t know. But I can say that I currently have no plans to subscribe to Playstation Plus. The potential features I’ve described would get me to pay for it in a heartbeat.

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