Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2007 > February > 05 > Entry
Updating your Wii, PS3, Xbox 360 (a lot)
Buying a next-generation game console?
Get ready for the update game.
What, you haven’t played that one yet? It’s almost as fun as “WarioWare, Inc.!” See, what happens is, you turn on your game console, expecting to play something, and instead you get a message telling you that you need to upgrade your game console for various bug fixes and enhancements.
Given that the Nintendo Wii and the PlayStation 3 are meant to be connected to the Internet 24/7 with their built-in WiFi capabilities (the PS3’s $599 version is the one with WiFi; the cheaper version has regular Ethernet), the consoles are capable of downloading updates that can tweak system performance or introduce new features. The Xbox 360, no slouch in this area, usually limits updates to a few large updates a year, but individual games might need a quick patch, as an alert will tell you when you try to play, say, “Gears of War.”
As game consoles get to be more like PCs, it’s gotten a bit out of hand. Over the past several weeks, I’ve actually spent more time applying patches to the buggy PlayStation 3 hardware than playing games on it. Almost once a week, I learn that my PS3 is running an old system software version. Time to update. And rather than being an unobtrusive automatic patch, each system update requires that you download the software, agree to a lengthy user agreement, install the software, plug in the PS3 controller via a USB cable and restart your system. The whole process rarely takes more than 10 or 15 minutes, but it’s still 10 or 15 minutes you’d rather be spending playing games on the system you paid more than $600 to play games on.
The Wii has limited its system updates to times when it introduces new features such as the downloadable Opera Web browser and its news channel. But many of these features arguably should have been available when the console launched in November, not introduced piecemeal over the next several months.
The Wii, at least, will retrieve messages from friends and character “Mii”s sent online even while the system is asleep via the Wii Connect service. You wake up in the morning and the disc slot glows blue, alerting you that there’s something waiting. Sometimes, though, it’s just another system update.
Fixing glitches is great and new features are welcome, but console makers still haven’t figured out a way to make system updates fun. They’re anti-fun, a slog that feels like unwelcome work.
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