Now, though, you can add networking to the mix, which isn’t yet necessarily as simple as it perhaps ought to be, and, of course, the minefield that is connecting your new device to an HDTV. Still, those have given us benefits for those who can do a bit of research, and even the dreaded patching is done automatically and quickly (mostly), meaning that a bug is no longer either something to deal with or wait for the second pressing.

But unfortunately, the one thing that I always hated about PC gaming has made the jump: installs. What started as a worrying but quick (Resistance, with its 220MB install) or optional process, taken through the promised land of Uncharted, which managed lush graphics with barely a load and no install, has now almost become the standard, and I HATE IT.

It just shouldn’t be happening. Big titles like Devil May Cry 4 require over 20 minutes of doing nothing before you can even play, and Metal Gear Solid 4 took it to the extreme by having five installs, with a new one if you ever load a save in an act that you’ve played before. The game may be able to fit onto one Blu-ray, as they delight in telling you, but I’m pretty sure I could get up and swap a disc faster than that.

I suppose it comes down to the relatively open nature of the PS3. By taking the good, like open standards for controllers and memory cards, you have to deal with the fact that the experience isn’t as tightly controlled. It’s the same reason why Metal Gear can have such a shitty online implementation and stuff like custom soundtracks, the system-level friends list, voice chat, and now achievements trophies aren’t supported in every game. It gives devs the option to skip a bit of optimisation in trying to get cross-platform titles to run identically.

At the moment it’s merely an annoyance, a one-time inconvenience, but I’m not looking forward to the long term. When you inevitably need to do some spring-cleaning and delete some older installs as your hard drive fills up, deleting that little cache takes away the plug-and-play nature of that game. When even fighting games – surely the most pick-up-and-play of all genres – have over 2GB of data to install (see Soul Calibur IV), it certainly takes away a lot of the immediacy. No one would watch a movie that had to install before you could play it.

So stop it, developers. Delay for a couple of weeks if you have to, but stop taking away what has always made consoles my preferred way to play games, especially if it doesn’t give us any benefit in return.

Despite my (correct) assertions that Ninja Gaiden is the best of the current big three 3D actioners, I’ve remained something of a Devil May Cry virgin. I’ve gotten to first base with the series, having owned the godawful PAL version of the original, but when I got frustrated with that and saw the bad reviews for DMC2 I just stopped caring about the series, so I never went all the way.

Naturally, with Devil May Cry 4 available in demo form and shortly to be released in all its glory, now is the time for me to get cosy with Dante. And that’s the last love analogy, I promise.

I nabbed myself a copy of the Devil May Cry 5th Anniversary Collection, which contains the three PS2 instalments in all their NTSC full-screen full-speed glory. A good deal at their original retail price, but thanks to some credit they only set me back £20. If you need proof that now is a good chance to go back and get the last generation’s classics for ridiculously low prices – assuming you don’t have a 40GB PS3 ;) – there you go.

I haven’t even had the chance to touch the second two games, being that I’ve found the first one obscenely hard. For all the flak that Ninja Gaiden gets for being difficult, when I revisited that last year I can honestly say that I didn’t hit a sticking point like I did with THE FIRST BOSS in Devil May Cry; the same point at which I got stuck when I first bought the game. I was getting my arse kicked, to the point that I restarted the game from scratch and spent a while fighting the enemies of the second mission, getting enough red orbs to buy more powerful attacks. Essentially I was being forced to grind in an action game. And when I did finally beat him I immediately suffered a kicking at the hands (paws?) of some shadowy big cat thing.

But yet I’m still thoroughly enjoying the game, even despite the awkward button layout. I’m finding that it has the same well-pitched learning curve to the combat that I enjoyed in Ninja Gaiden. You can feel yourself getting better at it and although death can be frequent, it’s usually something that you did wrong. It’s the thing that both series do right and that the fireworks of God of War have no answer to. And of course NG makes you feel like a ninja, DMC a badass demon hunter, while both have far deeper combat and combo systems. It’s no contest, really.

The Devil May Cry 4 demo is fantastic, by the way. I’ve played both versions and you can’t go wrong with either (depending on how much £10 is to you), and it’s looking like a phenomenal game – Nero is a great character and playing the original at the same time really shows how much more polished the series has become. And then with any luck by the time I finish it off we’ll be mere weeks away from Ryu’s next appearance. Can’t wait.

In any case, I had a nasty shock earlier today when I looked to get my preorder in. I first visited Gameplay, and then had a look around the others and noticed something strange:

All prices were correct at the time of writing, and though Gamestation, HMV, and Shopto were also checked they all had only one edition listed.

Why exactly is this? The supposed price increase that Blu-ray would bring for PS3 games never materialised and every previous multiplatform title has had price parity across both systems. Game owns Gameplay which could explain the difference there, but both Amazon and Play are independent which suggests that there’s a uniform difference in RRP. Indeed, the sites all list the PS3 RRP as being higher.

I wouldn’t expect this to become a regular thing, and indeed a quick recce of the same sites revealed the same price (± a few pennies) across the consoles for big multiplatform releases like Burnout Paradise and GTA4, but it’s still a bit of a mystery. The conspiracy theorist in me is looking for signs of a moneyhat…