SEGA’s Yakuza 3 released yesterday, and whilst it’s our rather more Japan-centric writer Kovacs that’ll be handling the reviewing duties, I couldn’t help but sneak a quick look in this morning before heading off to the post office.  After all, if it’s looking good in the first 30 minutes I might treat myself to a copy from HMV.

Well, I know this is a familiar rant and I know I’ve only had one cup of coffee so far, but I’m at the end of my tether with the frankly appalling installation times we’re forced to endure these days, watching a pathetic, wretched progress bar creep towards the right of the screen without anything else to amuse us whilst it does so.

It’s been about 5 minutes and 33% of whatever arbitrary volume it’s stutteringly dragging from the Blu-ray onto my already bursting at the seams 120GB drive.  The disk sounds like it’s about to give in, my TV has already gone into sleep mode and I’m sat here blogging about the damned thing rather than playing the game itself.

Yes, it’s just something we’re used to now on the PS3, but I’m getting tired of it.  Is there really no way around this?  Can the game not silently ‘install’ in the background as I’m playing it (a la Oblivion)? The game might well be the best thing since sliced tofu but unless I can get my hands on it before the post office shuts I’ll never know.

And does it really need to start the game with “There Is No System Data” as the first thing the user sees?  Yes, as a seasoned current-gen gamer I know it probably means that the game can’t find any existing save data, but – hey – if it can’t, just bloody well make some and get on with the installation, hardly a good first impression.

So, if a game needs the hard drive to run at a decent speed, do the donkey work in the background and leave me to put up with marginally slower load times for the first half hour.  I might make this a regular feature – see how much I can write before the game finally lurches onto my PS3′s hard drive in a state that’ll finally make it playable.

55%, by the way.