I purchased Ninja Gaiden and The Bourne Supremacy together and got to the 2nd stage of Ninja Gaiden while waiting for the PS3 update and the Bourne hard drive install to complete. Man those processes are long! Once complete, I shut off Ninja Gaiden(I hear you all groaning!) and proceeded to play through The Bourne Supremacy. Why?

Because I enjoyed parts of the Bourne demo enough to want to play the full game. All in all, the game isn' t all that bad. Sure it' s flawed, and at times kind of reminds of me a high-end budget title, but when all was said and done, I enjoyed it. If I were to review the game I' d likely give it a 7/10.

THE GOOD: I enjoyed the hand-to-hand combat. It' s a little limited, but still fun.
The Bourne Instinct is a cool feature. Not only does it highlight enemies and items on the map, as well as combustible items, but it can also be used for auto-aiming.
The shooting and cover mechanic is ok, nothing great, but a little better than what I initially thought of them in the demo. I really enjoyed killing enemies by blowing up the vehicles they were using for cover. The game also has a good check point system.

THE BAD: The driving portion of the game felt way too long. Even though there' s only one driving level, and even though I really like the way the car handles, the level just went on for way too long. At one point I literally shouted, " Alright, Enough already!"

I purchased the PS3 version because I thought I' d have an easier time with the QTE-like sequences, and I was right, but the game gave me problems in other areas. I never had any technical issues with other PS3 games before, but this game locked up on me about 10-12 times. After the hard drive install was completed and I started playing the game, the damn thing froze at every loading screen. I finally had enough and rebooted the system and that helped. Things ran a lot smoother from that point on, though, the game did lock up two more times, requiring a system reboot. I don' t know if it' s an isolated incident or whether it' s more widespread, but I' d probably recommend getting the Xbox 360 version instead.

Interesting read and it got me thinking. I wonder how things will evolve when it comes to installing on hard drives. One of the points of console gaming used to be that you just had to put in the cartridge/disc and you could start playing. Now more and more installations are needed. Which makes me wonder if more developers will start focusing on the pc platform instead. If it would prove to be financially interesting of course.

The point of console gaming has always been that it' s cheap and they last a long time, the point has never been to avoid install times, the only reason there haven' t been installs in the past was because of lack of HDD space. Next gen probably every game will have hdd install options as the next playstation/xbox will probably come with atleast 100GB of hd space.