Background patching for PS3: Rumour or reality?

Hello there. I hope that you're here to roam through the internet, to attempt to soak up as much gaming information and commentary as your brain will allow before you forget how to eat soup or wash.

But there may be another reason, in fact. If you're a PS3 gamer, you might well be here for one very simple reason: you can't actually play your PS3 right now. It's updating. Again.

Gamers new to this generation don't know they're born, with their shiny HD graphics, their particle effects and their universal online capabilities. In my day, we had a cartridge, a dark room and a high score to beat. But one way in which gaming has definitely gone backwards is in its laborious and time-consuming insistence on patching every damn time we turn our console on.

PS3 owners are certainly the most-blighted by this irritating new phenomenon. Barely a day goes by in which I'm not patching the thing or one of the games I want to play. The other day I felt like playing Burnout Paradise - big mistake, even bigger mandatory download. How on Earth Criterion felt they needed to add another 385MB to my hard drive, I'll never know. I backed out of the menu and have been avoiding one of my favourite racers ever since. It's gotten to the point where I have to insert a disc which I haven't played in a while just to check that I don't require an epic, internet-breaking download the next time I actually want to fire it up.

It shouldn't be this way. I should be able to game on my own terms, not be dictated to by a little (well, large) black box about when I install what. And, for the love of all that is holy, games developers need to learn how to release a polished, perfect game from day one, not rely on epically large, hard disk-stuffing updates in order to keep glitches at bay.

What about the (still significant) proportion of HD gamers without readily-available internet access on their console? It's not fair to release your latest run 'n' gun 'n' race 'n' pimp title full of glitches and game-breaking problems and expect the internetless-minority to just put up with it. Two to three years of development producing games which are immediately patched upon release just smacks of a poor attention to detail and a lazy development studio.

That's why I hope that the recent rumours of background patching on PS3 are true. It's about time. Time-poor gamers can't afford to lose even half an hour to install a bunch of 'updates' which, nine times out of ten, are simply security patches built to lock out the active minority trying to tap into the system. If I had all the time back that I'd been waiting for patches, well, I might have found the time to slog through Final Fantasy XIII.

I know, I know. That would have been an equally wasteful  use of the time. But it would be on my terms - and that's what Sony needs to realise - a games console is built to provide entertainment for the gamer, on demand. That's why if background patching is no more than a rumour, I implore the Playstation people to make it a reality.