Yesterday Biggie and I tried out the game sharing multiplayer built into Burnout Legends on the PSP. After trying out the WipeOut Pure game share available on the MediEvil UMD, we expected it to be quick and painless. Damn were we ever wrong.. Unlike the WipeOut Demo, that apparently game shares all the game data in the initial transfer, it seems as if the Burnout game sharing functionality actually loads the entire level over the WiFi before each game, and doesn’t allow any sort of quick retrying. What this essentially means is that you spend about 3-5 minutes waiting for the level to load before actually getting a chance to race. Of course once the racing actually starts, it’s an absolute blast. There is absolutely zero lag, and the racing is solid. Of course the spectator is great as well.. and I think if it wasn’t for the insane load times (we only got two races in the space of half an hour!), everyone would have enjoyed a go, I’m sure.
While the idea of loading levels over WiFi is great in the sense that as levels and cars are unlocked, you could try them in multiplayer, I don’t think the developers ever really bothered to try the gameshare multiplayer. If they had, they might have tried speeding up the load by compressing the data or something. I suppose it’s a good tactic to get you to buy the game though so you can play multiplayer without the loading hassle.
1 comments:
Well, no. The idea of game sharing is that you can transmit a version (usually a demo) over WiFi to another PSP, so that the other PSP's owner can try it on that machine. It's kind of like the multiplayer 'spawn' version that was used in Diablo 1.
The only other game share I have tried so far is the WipeOut one, and in that case, the single 30-second transmission included the level data for the one level you could play. So when you set up a multiplayer game with that shared demo, it was just a case of connecting to the lobby, and jumping into gameplay. In this case, the initial transfer only seemed to include the actual game (the code) and maybe menu data. When you play a multiplayer game, it seems as if the entire level is loaded off the original you shared from over WiFi, which leads to a 3-5 minute load time.
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