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{{trope}}
[[File:sonicloadingstill.gif|link=Sonic the Hedgehog (2006
{{quote|''"Fortunately, the loading screens will give you plenty of time to calm down, make a cup of tea, and perhaps read that book you've been meaning to get into."''|'''[[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee's]]''' [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v{{=}}hi2xsKHKRUM&feature{{=}}g-vrec&context{{=}}G2690134RVAAAAAAAABA review] of ''[[Duke Nukem Forever]]''}}
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''...{{color|#ee1100|LOADING}}...''
''"Whensoever games are loaded off disk, whether that be a floppy, a hard drive, or some kind of [[Blu
''...{{color|#ee1100|LOADING}}...''
Ah, [[Loading Screen
''...{{color|#ee1100|LOADING}}...''
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[[Doorstopper|down quickly.]] See also [[Dynamic Loading]], when loading sequences are performed "behind the scenes" and (hopefully) go unnoticed by the player.
{{examples}}
=== [[Action Adventure]] ===▼
▲== [[Action Adventure]] ==
* The PlayStation version of ''Blood Omen: [[Legacy of Kain]]'' suffered heavily from this. Which is a bad thing, as the game is a classic, and the PlayStation version is otherwise the definitive one. Other games in the series ranged from short to barely existent loading times. ''Soul Reaver'' in particular only had one loading screen, when you first loaded the save, after which all new environments were streamed as you came to them, with nary a hiccup.
** Sadly, the problem persists even while playing the one bought off of PSN. Strangely enough, it seems playing it on the PSP cuts loading time in half (or it feels that way)
** The PC version (released a year later) had almost zero loading times.
*** Fun Fact: The [[
** The PlayStation 2 even had the option to spin the disk faster, but this was problematic for quite a few games. In fact, the last few games released for the PlayStation acknowledged this and specifically said to not enable this feature.
* ''Superman: Man of Steel'' for the ''[[Commodore 64]]''. Not to be confused with ''[[Superman 64|The New Superman Aventures]]'' for the ''[[Nintendo 64]]'', which was bad for other reasons.
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** The PS2 version of ''Curse of Darkness'' suffers from loading times when the player moves from one screen to another.
** The cartridge-based titles arguably didn't ''need'' these loading sections, given that they only serve to divide up "castle sections" and not actual "game screens" which are all of a pretty equal size. They're retained to give a smooth transition of music and art style.
*** Load times for cartridges are an ''extremely'' complicated issue. Cartridges work, in theory, by allowing the system to access data near-instantly (as fast as electricity can travel through the solid-state ROM chips used to store the game data). Though some consoles like the N64 used slow rom which means AND that the CPU didn't have access to the ROM directly. Which mean it can only stream items that don't require fast memory, like sound or animation and load everything else in RAM. The problem is that solid-state memory is not nearly as fast as dynamic RAM (except for the NES, SNES, [[
**** Crazy Taxi with a lengthy load time after you pick a car.
**** One GBA game with noticeable load times is ''Donkey Kong Country 3''. Every time you enter a level, you have to wait for it to load. While the load times aren't terrible (about 5 seconds at most), don't forget that this is a ''cartridge''. Not to mention, the SNES version didn't suffer from this problem, and that came out 9 years earlier.
*** Shadow Man for N64 did have short loading screens for areas, though it was also a rather large game that was originally made for the PC and had very little content cut out for the N64.
* Averted in ''[[Advent Rising]]''. The console version of this game ''would'' have staggering loading times - up to two minutes, several times a level. It gets around this by loading pre-rendered cutscenes (varying from story scenes to suggestions of what to do next to a bunch of pretty scenery) and playing those at the loading points, preventing the player from skipping them until loading is finished.
* ''[[Harry Potter]] and the Chamber of Secrets'' on [[
* The video game adaptation of ''[[Finding Nemo]]'' on Gamecube took a stupidly long time to load. It was also ridiculously easy.
** Just keep loading, just keep loading, just keep loading, loading, loading...
* The [[
** Two of them, actually: one about button mashing and one about timed presses. They even net you Demon Fangs!
** And the Wii version doesn't have this, so we just sit there and wait a good minute or two for every area to load.
* ''[[Lego Island]] 2'' had load times so long, you could actually use the time to consult the manual, and brush up on your knowledge of how to play the next mini-game. The PSX version did not improve on this issue at all, and neither does a modern-day PC. Trust me, you'll very quickly tire of that low-res pizza.
* Both played straight and [[Averted]] with the game ''Haven: Call of the King'' for the [[
=== [[Action Game]] ===
* ''[[Devil May Cry]] 3'' had decent length load screens; but let you goof around by shooting and slashing the "Now Loading" words and actually let you shatter them if you did it enough...though this actually makes the loading times LONGER despite how fun it is.
** The PC version has no loading screens though.
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=== [[Adventure Game]] ===
* Possibly the worst loading times ever seen are in ''[[King's Quest: Mask of Eternity|King's Quest Mask of Eternity]]'', with loads upwards of twenty minutes for each level. Mask of Eternity, in order to conserve hard disk space, only kept the current region files on the hard drive. When you first started a region, it copied that region's files from the CD to the game folder and when you left for a new area, it uninstalled the previous region files and installed the upcoming area's files. There's only 9 regions in the game (two of them extremely small) and the other 7 quite large. That means switching levels was kinda like doing a semi-uninstall/install each time, deleting like 100 MB from your hard drive and then copying another 100 MB from the CD back onto it. (real fun with a 2x CD-Rom drive) There was no official way to do a full install of the game either.
* ''[[Broken Sword]] 3'' had load times of a few minutes every time you entered a new area. As one [[
* ''[[Leisure Suit Larry]]: Magna Cum Laude'' had immensely long load times when starting up, when loading any mini-game (which is practically all the gameplay), and when going from any area to any other area... like, say, from your dorm room ''to the hall outside.'' The graphics were in no way detailed enough to justify this.
** The REALLY bizarre thing about this is that, if you Alt-Tab out of the game and then restore it, the load time instantly reaches 100%. Which makes one wonder if the loads were just made long so you would have time to stare at the [[Fan Service|scantily-clad women]] in the loading screens.
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=== [[Beat'Em Up]] ===
* ''[[Batman Forever]]'' on the SNES. Between every (or at least nearly every) screen, there was a black screen urging the player to "HOLD ON." The "Forever" part must have been how long you were going to wait for the thing to finish loading...
* The initial [[
** However, the update itself takes about an hour to install...
* ''[[Fist of the North Star]]:'' ''[[Dynasty Warriors|Ken's Rage]]'' suffered noticeably [[Porting Disaster|in its conversion from the PS3 to the Xbox 360]]: Going by [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9k03WEBSIc this comparison video], the combined loading time it takes for the level (and in-between cutscenes and menus) to load off the DVD drive on a 360 is a whopping 44 seconds, and ''over a minute'' with the DLC (just under ten times the amount of loading for the [[
=== [[Card Battle Game]] ===
* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh! Reshef of Destruction]]'' for the GBA had a horrible case of this. Every time you did anything at all within a duel, cue a 2-second field scan. It takes about 1 second to play a card, then 2 seconds to load. Oh, and if you play any of the cards the game is scanning for, it becomes about 5 seconds. Each. Time. This was particularly egregious because going to a new area took about the same amount of time to load. Yes, an entire CITY loads as quickly as 1 card.
* The recent ''Yu-Gi-Oh World Championship'' games are getting worse and worse with this. Games from 2009 on suffer from loading times in between your opponent's actions, with the loading times getting longer and longer the more crowded the playing field gets. The loading times seem to get worse with each game.
=== [[Driving Game]] ===
* ''[[Star Wars]]: Episode 1 Racer'' for the Sega Dreamcast hit what must be some sort of zenith, with loading screens constantly interrupting the '''ending credits'''.
* ''[[The Simpsons Road Rage]]'' was ruined by loading times. We're talking 50 seconds of loading for a task that only lasts for 20 seconds...
* The PC version of ''Pure'' has a bizarre bug where, if vertical sync is ''at all'' enabled either in-game or forced through the video card's separate options, ''all'' loading screens will suddenly turn into three-to-five minutes wait-fests. There is a loading screen after starting the game for the intro, a loading screen for the main menu, and at least two more loading screens to get into a race. If you've made Damn well sure that V-sync is off, each loading screen takes about ten seconds, if that.
* ''[[Wangan Midnight]] Maximum Tune 3'' often had players stuck at the loading screen for about
* ''[[Midnight Club]] 3: Dub Edition'' on the PSP suffered from loading times normally twice as long as the race it's trying to load, mostly due to the fact that the graphics look essentially the same as the console versions, just a few bits taken out.
* Criterion did their best to cut down on loading screens in ''[[Burnout]] Paradise'', and for the most part, they were successful, however, what the game has instead is Loads and Loads of Microloading, which is to say, every time you pause the game or check the map, there is a small but noticeable delay. This is not great for compulsive map checkers.
** However the 10+ second delay going from car to car in the junkyard before it actually appears on screen is annoying as heck.
** This was ostensibly an attempt to combat ''Burnout Revenge's'' loading times. At least on 360, it suffered from its own 30-45 second load screens each time you had to load a course, even if you restart a race.
* Racing game series ''Forza'' has notoriously long load times. ''[[Forza
* A fairly common complaint with ''[[Modnation Racers]]'' is its long loading times, which can take upwards of 45 seconds.
* ''[[Gran Turismo|Gran Turismo 5]]'' has some notoriously bad loading times (especially if you do not do the optional install), with more delays and apparent lock-ups if the game can't see PSN but your console can (due to a slightly desynchronized clock). Among these is a minute-plus wait after attempting anything that remotely involves the internet if your clock is not correct just to tell you that your clock is not correct. [http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-gran-turismo-5/17-3535/ This lead to a 90-minute quick look from Giant Bomb, over half of which was spent either in menus waiting for things to load or at loading screens waiting for the game to load.] (to be fair, once the guys stumble across the first of the actual load screens, they quickly realize that installing the game might have been a better idea and bring it up whenever they hit another loading screen)
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''...{{color|red|LOADING}}...''
=== [[Fighting Game]] ===
* [https://web.archive.org/web/20110420051745/http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1166948086140164262 This video] explains why the PSP version of ''Smackdown vs Raw 2006'' might not be the best use of your money...
** And then there is ''Smackdown vs RAW 2007'', which would have multiple loading screens in a row.
** So did ''SvR 2006'', and the [[
*** Interestingly, there were several games in the old [[PS 1]] library that would show multiple loading screens in a row.
* The otherwise superb ''[[Super Smash Bros.]] Brawl'' suffers from this. Transforming characters also take longer to load than they did in ''Melee''. If multiple characters transform at once, the loading time will even increase for all involved. Additionally, scrolling through the various alternate colours for your character will add on to the loading time for the match for some reason.
** The game's creator on the development blog, I believe, actually acknowledged that little point, mentioning that the loading process begins as soon as characters are selected in an attempt to cut down on the time spent on the loading screen and that changing settings caused the "masking" of the loading time to not work as well. It is partially justifiable, though, since ''Brawl'' is the first double-layer disc the [[Wii]] had.
** The loading times also make some of the Event matches, where you have to beat a certain amount of enemies in a limited time, [[Unwinnable]], as you'll lose
** Smash 4, is down right horrible, especially if your having trouble on something. To wit, it has to load the game over screen, and then reload the fight. This could potentially be justified by having to load a new batch of item spawning data, but it even occurs in situations where items can't spawn.
* ''[[Street Fighter Alpha]] 2'' saw a port on the Super NES saw infuriatingly long load times. Using the SDD-1 chip for decompression, it took about 8 whole seconds at the start of each fight (in a genre where rounds usually have a time limit between one and two minutes, this is a long time); the screen would stop dead in its tracks, music and all, to load everything, despite the many, many, ''many'' technical shortcuts they had to take to even pull the port off.
** The Saturn version of it also has plenty of loading screens. It does have an option to cut out most of the bits between battles to cut the loading to a minimum though.
** Endless loading screens were also a common complaint with the [[
** ''[[Street Fighter IV]]'' (at least the PS3 version) doesn't have ''that'' long loading times, but in the arcade mode, you're required to re-select a character each time you lose and select "continue". Over time (and especially against [[SNK Boss|Seth]]), those 25 seconds of loading for a new match will start to feel like forever. [[Aesop|Moral of the story]]: Allow players to select "continue with the same character" to avoid reloading.
* The [[
* ''[[
** Sadly, ''[[
** ''Calamity Trigger Portable'' had them as well, but really, what do you expect from UMD?
** Blazblue: EXTEND for the Vita isn't much better, requiring more than twice as long as the console versions before every fight. But unlike the much faster console versions that can install some data, the Vita version of Abyss mode is made totally unplayable, since you're loading entirely new matches for a good
=== [[First-Person Shooter]] ===
* [[Subverted Trope]] by some video games such as ''[[World in Conflict]]'' and ''[[Call of Duty|Call of Duty 4]]'' where normally long single player load screens are made enjoyable by putting in expository dialog and slickly produced cut-scenes to set up the next mission. Almost all the times the game is finished loading before the dialogue ends - if the player then presses a button, they can play instantly.
** In fact nearly anything that has a briefing uses this nowadays. If there IS a plain black loading screen it is to load the dialogue/cutscenes first and then get the game content out of the way while that plays.
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* ''[[Serious Sam]] 1'' opens with a long loading screen that's ''skippable''. It's loading a demo level, and hitting ESC will get you to the main menu where you can actually play the game.
* The PS2 version of ''[[Deus Ex]]'' divided all the areas of the PC version into smaller maps with loading between them. In areas where there are no enemies it occasionally takes shorter time to run through the map than the time it took to load it (especially annoying at the UNATCO base and in Hong Kong where loading times may get as long as 30 seconds).
* ''[[Deus Ex: Invisible War|Deus Ex Invisible War]]'' doesn't as much load a new level as restart the game with the correct level loaded. Additionally, even over half a decade after it's release, it still takes quite a bit of time to load a new level on a modern, high-end computer, and the levels in the game small because it was made for the 64mb of RAM the [[
* This is the main reason ''[[Counter-Strike]]: Condition Zero'' is so reviled. ''Counter Strike'' had sensible load times, but the AI in ''Condition Zero'' required a lot of additional resources to be loaded into the server's (read: your computer's) memory. It would also tend to freeze up for long periods of time.
* Another example of a cartridge game requiring loading: ''[[Alien vs. Predator]]'' for the [[Atari Jaguar]]. When you first selected a campaign, it needed to load up the "simulation," and any time you rode an elevator or entered/exited an air duct, be prepared for the action to freeze for several seconds while the new area is loaded.
* ''[[Painkiller]]'' loaded new levels so very slowly!
* ''[[
* ''[[Chrome]]'' has really horribly long loading times - even when quickloading.
* ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', among other [[Valve|Source games]] Loads the entire game from start up and it depends on your computer how long it will take. (Most of the time it's 2 or so minutes.) Connect to a server also depends on your computer's speed. The worst part? Sometimes you can connect to a server with a false player count, thus making everything completely pointless.
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*** Indeed it does. When connecting to a server, the game first downloads the server metadata, then it proceeds to download the current active game maps, then it downloads any custom models and scripts the server has installed, and finally it downloads the sounds, before validating the client info and connecting for real. If the game finds that the map has changed while it was downloading all that, it will proceed to download the server metadata all over, the new game map, and sometimes any other models, scripts and sounds that the new map calls for. Depending on your connection, the server's connection, how tricked up the server is, the time you connect to the server, and whether you already have the map downloaded in the past, this can take anywhere between half a minute to '''a few hours'''. It should be noted that this also applies to Garry's Mod.
** It's also worth noting that ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', along with most other Source games, take COMPLETE control of the game itself and the Steam overlay when loading, making it seem as if the game has crashed. For newcomers to the game it might seem that the game crashes on every server, while for veterans loading servers still proves to be an annoyance should the player want to make use of the Steam overlay for whatever reason. The game doesn't wait for you during this either. As soon as the first person connects, the game begins. Sure, ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'' has a 20 second "Waiting for Players" phase, but not only do other Source games not have it (Like, say, [[Left 4 Dead]] with it's versus mode in which if there is no connected other team the game ends), but on the lower end computers, the 20 second phase wasn't long enough!
** NOTE: If you want to be able to do other things in Source games while loading, and your computer is relatively good, you can consult this link [http://www.tf2nubs.co.uk/index.php?action=printpage;topic=1415.0\], which applies to other Source games as well.
* ''[[System Shock 2]]'' had a persistent world and saved the state of every object in a level to immense save files that took a very long time to load.
* ''[[Unreal]]'' was famous for taking approximately half a minute or more to load almost anything. Given the game's highly advanced (at the time) graphics and level design, it's not ''that'' surprising. However, when you take into account the game's numerous bugs and compatibility issues, it's hard not to see the [[Incredibly Lame Pun|epic]] load times as a tragically irritating design flaw.
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=== [[Hack and Slash]] ===
* ''[[Diablo II]]'' had a particularly unpleasant example at the end of Act 2 - in multiplayer games, while you're waiting for the final boss area to load, said boss has already started attacking you, frequently resulting in players being dead before they can do anything. In earlier versions of the Expansion, the 5th wave of minions before the final boss caused a similar lag spike.
** Thankfully these were fixed in later patches
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=== [[Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game|MMORPG]]s ===
* In ''[[
** Especially enjoyable in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' if you are traveling on a ship. When you're done loading, the ship might already have left the harbor again... although in general, the game is rather easy on loading times, generally only requiring them for going from one continent to the other or into a instanced dungeon.
*** Blackwing Lair was notoriously bad in this regard. Due to its vertical multi-story design, the game engine had to load every floor ''including the final boss'' when a player entered the dungeon. On slower computers, loading the whole dungeon at once took so much time that the server disconnected the player due to a timeout, requiring the player to reconnect and load everything again and again and again..
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** If you are entering a region you never visited for the first time, it will take several minutes for everything to be rendered into view, including avatars of other people. However, once you visit the same region frequently, rendering times become shorter due to everything being stored in the cache.
* ''[[Atlantica Online]]'' can get quite annoying in this regard when you use teleportation. You can only teleport to friends, towns or dungeons. Want to talk to a quest NPC in front of a town? You get two loading screens, one for entering the town, one for leaving. Thanks to poor optimisation, the load times also get longer and longer as you keep playing, unless you restart your computer every now and then.
* ''[[
* ''[[Magic: The Gathering]] Online'' get this at the program startup. It takes some time to open on normal utilisation, but what makes it an example of this trope is the updating process that add considerable time to the starting-up process. And it gets updated a lot.
* ''[[League of Legends]]'' is not a particularly slow loading game, but being a free to play multiplayer game, some players have outdated or budget bhardware and slow everyone's loading time to a crawl. The loading screen does display individual progress percentages, so you know exactly who is making you wait 4 more minutes after your own 11 second loading time.
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=== Pinball ===
* The PS1 game ''[[Extreme Pinball]]'' had horrid load
''...{{color|red|LOADING}}...''
=== [[Platform Game]] ===
* The [[Xbox 360]]/[[
** For a more basic overview, a few ''[[Something Awful]]'' forumites [http://lparchive.org/Sonic-The-Hedgehog-2006/ kept track of the game's load times] during a single-sitting [[Let's Play]] of this game: The sum of all the game's load screen time was nearly two and a half hours, in a game that took them twenty hours and sixteen minutes to beat, or ''eleven percent'' of the overall play time. To put that into perspective you could watch ''[[The Dark Knight]]'' in the time it takes for all that loading (not including credits).
** Two especially [[Egregious]] examples spring to mind. First, one of the levels has four separate loading screens-just to go between different sections of the level. Second is the constant problem inherent with doing the challenges provided by random passersby. First you'll have a conversation, where you choose to accept the challenge. Then there'll be a loading screen that lasts something like thirty seconds so that the challenge can tell you what to actually do, in a single textbox that you can read in three seconds. Then there's another, longer loading screen so you can actually do the challenge. Then if you fail, which you will likely do, you'll get another loading screen so that the person who gave you the challenge can tell you that you've failed, and then the game loads ''again'' to put you back to where you started ''before'' accepting the challenge.
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* ''[[Prince of Persia]]: Revelations'', the PSP version of ''Warrior Within'', would often pause to load in the middle of gameplay, with absolutely no warning or regard to the action happening on screen. Sometimes it would happen as the player was simply walking, which wouldn't be so much of a problem. Worse is when it would happen in the middle of combat, or during a platforming segment.
** The PC versions of ''Warrior Within'' and ''The Two Thrones'' also suffered from this, forcing you to watch the loading screen animation in full even if the game itself reloaded in one or two seconds. They also forced you watch a pointless and annoyingly long 'death' cutscene whenever you died. Simply deleting all the loading and death cutscenes from the game's folder makes the game infinitely more playable.
* The fourth ''[[Crash Bandicoot]]'' game (''The Wrath of Cortex'') -- which was also the first game not developed by Naughty Dog and the first one for the PlayStation 2 -- suffered from this. Many of the levels could be completed faster than their load times. Playstation magazines used it as the yardstick for bad loading times for years afterward. The game was released very soon after the [[
* ''Conker: Live and Reloaded'', the Xbox [[Video Game Remake|remake]] of ''[[
* From the first game, the ''[[Metroid]]'' series has used elevators to disguise its loading times (remember, it was originally a Famicom Disk System game.) The 3D games still do this for travel between areas, but now individual rooms also have to be loaded. The ''Prime'' games hide this well by loading the next room as you approach a door, and refusing to open it until the room is ready. This usually just takes a second, so it's not too annoying... but now and then a door will take forever to open, and leave you a sitting duck in the meantime. (Also, the loading system was buggy in the original NTSC release, liable to crash the game if
** Some of the room loads in ''[[Metroid Prime]] 3: Corruption'' can leave you standing around for several seconds waiting for the door. This is almost always due to loading a scripted event, so you can usually tell when something's going down just by how long it takes the door to open.
** ''[[Metroid: Other M]]'' is the first game in the series to actually pause the screen and say "LOADING". If you're playing casually, you may never see
** And then there's ''Metroid Prime Hunters'', which tried to use small empty hallways between rooms to disguise the loading, like the ''Symphony of the Night'' example above. [[Epic Fail|It does not work]], as you can often spend as much as 10 seconds standing at the door waiting for the damn thing to open, particularly if one of the other Hunters or Guardians are in the next room. Keep in mind this is on a ''DS cart''...
* The 2009 ''[[Bionic Commando]]'' game has so much loading that [[Zero Punctuation|Yahtzee]] included some in his [https://web.archive.org/web/20131014190629/http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/759-Bionic-Commando review].
* In Spongebob Squarepants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman for the [[
=== [[Puzzle Game]] ===
* The PS3 version of ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' seems to have a bad case of this.
** ''[[Portal (series)|Portal]]'' has designated loading areas, mostly in logical places (namely elevator rides), but if you are quick at the game and your computer isn't so fast you see a lot more Loading than portaling.
* ''[[Myst]]: Uru: Complete Chronicles'' has this. Badly, sometimes. First person adventure games may not have been meant to be [[
* ''Riven'', the second game in the ''Myst'' series, compounded its loading time frustrations by making you physically swap CDs whenever you went to a different island. Towards the end of the game this could result in you having to shuffle three CDs ''just to follow one fairly long path between two points''. Thankfully, this issue can be avoided on newer systems by ripping the CDs and tweaking the configuration files so that the game loads its resources from disk.
** There's also the DVD version that has everything on one disc, plus a nice making-of video.
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=== [[Real Time Strategy]] ===
* [[Army Men]] RTS has this (at least the game cube version does).
* The [[
* ''[[Command
** The entire process of loading is parodied by [[Red Alert 3 Paradox]] with an eternally loading loading bar on their [http://www.moddb.com/mods/red-alert-3-paradox moddb page here]. It loads factions, background information, memes and at one point literally "something completely unrelated".
* ''[[Command
* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]: Mark of Chaos'' has actual load times (complete with prompt) before A LOADING SCREEN. Repeatedly.
* The 1998 DOS/Windows/PSX RTS ''[[Conquest Earth]]'' had animations and background videos just about everywhere, and could at times take more than 10 seconds to load between different sections in the menu. The fact that every menu was preceded by
* Interminable load times for the campaign were a major part of what made ''[[Warhammer
** Many huge mods such as Firestorm over Kronus respectively have their own long loading times. [[Fridge Brilliance|Of course, we're not just talking about a mod that adds new units and graphical changes (Even the Graphical User Interface),]] [[Justified Trope|but it also rewrites the game's original mechanics to something that doesn't look out of place in a codex.]]
=== [[Rhythm Game]] ===▼
▲== [[Rhythm Game]] ==
* ''[[Guitar Hero]] III'' and subsequent games in the series have trouble with this. Loading screens were needed to load a new ''menu screen''. Just picking a song on quickplay could take far longer than it should because the game requires four loading periods just to go through all the options beforehand.
** Not only that, but on some of the Wii versions of ''World Tour'', the final pre-performance loading screen would freeze itself before heading to the performance. This arose an issue because the game would also fully freeze on those same spots, making it rather indistinguishable whether you were about to play or about to reset the console.
*** An even worse case from the Wii edition of "World Tour" was practice mode. Every time you wanted to restart a section, you had to select "restart"... and then sit through another loading screen. If you're practicing an entire song, this could be worse. If you're practicing a 20 second section of a song, however....
** Not to mention the [[
* ''[[Lego Adaptation Game]] [[Rock Band]]'' has this. Badly. As in almost every transition between menus. And it's a good five seconds every time. So if you're in the Rock Den and your green drum accidentally hits on the Rock Shop when you were going for Free Play? Five seconds of loading to get there, and five more to get back, then five MORE to get the Free Play menu when you actually select it.
* [[Rhythm Game]] ''[[In
** They're also optimized for going forward, so backtracking, especially from the mod menu back to the song select menu, are the slowest load times.
* ''Beat City'' for the Nintendo DS has this problem which is somewhat odd for a cartridge based handheld game, and especially one that's clearly inspired by ''[[Rhythm Heaven]]'', a game with next to no loading times on the same system.
=== [[Role
* The first ''[[Persona]]'' game for [[PS 1]] was guilty of this in both the Japanese and American versions, albeit the worst loading session was maybe ten seconds in length. The only difference between both in terms of difference was the American version added a "Now Loading" screen instead of just leaving black transitions.
* ''[[The Witcher]]'', at least before the patch, had scandalously long load times, and when transitioning a lot (and entering a hut, a cave, anything, counted as a transition), players spent more time watching load screens than actually playing. It was corrected in a patch, but by then, many players were already holding fists full of hair.
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** Miranda [[Lampshade Hanging|lampshades]] this in the second game, showing her frustration at a slow elevator by smashing it with an omni-tool to make it go faster.
* ''[[Dungeon Siege]]'' averted this completely. The only loading screen is (duh?) when [[Captain Obvious|loading up a saved game]]. Along the way, there is absolutely zero loading screen. You transit smoothly from indoor to outdoor, from the beginning to the end. It works effectively, making the world feels like a whole, connected space. The second game sugarcoats the loading sequence between teleportations with warp effect.
* The [[
** All of the old games that Square ported from the NES/SNES had this problem. Level grinding in all of them, and particularly hunting Rages on the Veldt in ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'', becomes downright impossible unless you have loads of free time and/or patience.
* [[Fable]] 2 loads each location you enter, with enough time to read two hints during the load.
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* ''[[Odin Sphere]]'' makes great use of large, beautifully hand-drawn sprites, but this causes stages to load slowly. The most annoying example is the Pooka Village - if one wants to visit both restaurants, one will have to wait through the loading screen for the village, the café, the village again, the restaurant, and the village one last time. And that's if one already has all the ingredients needed to make some food.
** This was alleviated in the European release of the game, which had very minimal load times.
** Playing on a backwards-compatible [[
* The [[
* ''[[Suikoden V]]'' seemed incapable of retaining more than one small screen of the world in its memory at a time; or so the fracturing of your base would lead you to believe. It got to the point where gamers were plotting routes through their base to minimize the number of loading screens they'd have to sit through, even if they actually had to walk farther.
** ''Suikoden V'' also had annoyingly long loading times for getting in and out of combat, which was particularly aggravating considering it has graphics more comparable to [[
* [[Chaos Wars|''Spectral Souls'']] (PSP) doesn't seem to keep anything in memory. There's a load-time of up to 3 seconds before every attack animation, even if you use the same attack 3 times in a row, and a load-time between each page of a character's dialogue. It would be a solid SRPG, if only you didn't spend more time loading than playing.
** The main problem with this is because this game is a '''direct''' port of a [[
** The fourth and fifth ''Generation of Chaos'' games were also especially bad for this, taking up to fifteen seconds to load a special attack animation, and even longer if you have voices turned on.
* The original Wintel/Mac version of ''[[Fallout]]'' had loading screens from each area to the next, when Omni re-ported it to the new Mac OS along with the previously Wintel-only sequel years later, the loading times were reduced so much that they completely omitted the loading screens.
* The XBox 360 version of ''[[Oblivion]]'' had long loading times as well. Granted, the average loading screen didn't last as long as some of the record-breakers on this page (
** Then there's the fact that the Xbox 360 version doesn't begin to load downloaded content until after you press Start, so you can't just fire up the game then come back in a couple minutes and be ready to start. You must get through the initial splash screens, then press start, then wait. But as the previous editor pointed out, the load times aren't terrible.
* ''Magic Pengel''. Oh God, ''Magic Pengel''... to get from anywhere to anywhere you have to sit through loading screens that can be up to a full minute long, during which NOTHING HAPPENS. And you have to travel around constantly in this game; if you aren't watching cutscenes, drawing Doodles or fighting, you're walking around or waiting for the stupid game to load so you CAN walk around.
** The sequel, ''Graffiti Kingdom'', is much better about this; the loading screens are more frequent, but they are very, very short, sometimes not even a whole second in length.
* ''[[Dragon Quest VIII]]'' had some of the worst loading times of any [[
** Counting the time with any animation onscreen that you have to wait for, it seems to take an average of 15 seconds to load your saved game, 10 seconds to enter or leave a town,
** And how about when you use the orb to fly over the world map? You can actually hear half of the world map's BGM before it finally finishes loading the screen.
* ''[[Star Wars]]: [[The Force Unleashed]]'' played relatively well with very little loading. Unfortunately, every option on the pause menu (at least in the 360 version)took a good
* ''[[Final Fantasy VII]]'', if you played it on computer, required ''better'' than the minimum specs. The minimum specs would run the game ok for the most part, but the coliseum section had a very short cut scene that had Cloud run toward the centre of an arena surrounded on all sides by bubbling green acid. If you didn't have significantly more than the minimum specs, this usually 5 second cut-scene would literally last 15 minutes.
* In ''[[Final Fantasy XIII-2]]'', entering an area from the Historia Crux can take upwards of a minute on the [[
** There are, however, a large amount of loading screens, significantly more than its prequel. The above example is the worst offender but you'll be spending a little while sitting through loading screens, especially if you are in an area with lots of cutscenes.
* The SNES game ''[[The Lord of the Rings]] Volume One'' had several seconds of loading times between areas - which was quite jarring on a system where loading time was practically unheard of. Disabling music makes it a lot faster.
* ''[[Tales of the Abyss]]'' for the Playstation 2 had an animated loading screen every time you entered a new location, and it took even longer to load when booting up a cutscene. Though, it made it easy to tell when a cutscene was coming, because the animation would freeze. Also, after battles on the world map, it takes a ridiculously long time to load up the map. Particularly annoying, as 2 dungeons technically take place on the map...
** The load times being especially awful when you were in the desert.
* A little-known [[
* ''[[Mana Khemia: Alchemists of Al
* The PC title ''[[Dungeon Lords]]'' (which looks a LOT like an MMO, but it's single-player) has its fair share of loading screens whenever you change maps. What's notable, however, is that it doesn't preload the map with critters ? instead, the game effectively has an empty map until you either trigger a set encounter or have a random one, at which time the program will pause for a second or so while it renders them. The upshot of this is that, whenever you see your character (or the background) freeze for a half-second, you know there's something coming that'll require a good smacking. You can change the frequency of random encounters in the options, and I do NOT recommend using the "More" setting.
* ''[[Pokémon Diamond and Pearl]]'' games may give you a message when you save that it's "saving a lot of data," which means it will take about three times as long to load. This caused by the Box System. If you catch a Pokémon and it's sent to the box, prepare to take a while to save. If you look at the Box System for one second and don't even bother ''touching'' anything, prepare to take a long while to save. If you go ''hours'' on your journey without bothering to mess with the Box System, you'll save in a few seconds.
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** Oh, but it gets better. The game features [[PS 1]]-style fade in/fade out transitions to make the loading less noticeable, but these transitions are STILL THERE in the Playstation Network version. PSN versions of games require hardly any loading, if any at all, since the entire game has been installed on your memory card, but due to the the fade animation you have still have to wait like everyone who bought a disk copy.
* ''[[Lost Odyssey]]'', or, as it's affectionately called, "Loading Odyssey". While the loading screens in Lost Odyssey aren't as massive as other examples on this list, you're faced with one rather long one every time you change screens, start a cutscene or enter a battle; which, being a JRPG, happens a lot. The loading screens also have loading screens for them (i.e. it starts out as a black screen with a small 'loading' on the bottom, and eventually a small character sheet from one of the game's playable characters pops up), and said character sheets are even minor spoilers on their own, as some characters appear on said sheets before they actually join the group(or, in one particular case, even show up at all).
* ''[[Legend of Mana]]'' on [[
* ''[[Vagrant Story]]'' is similarly a heavy offender, especially for load times when saving and loading. Mostly because it used a huge amount of memory card space for each save, but what can you do? The room-to-room and cutscene load times were not that great, either.
* '' [[Riviera: The Promised Land]] '' was a GBA RPG that was later ported to the PSP. Along with this, it received a massive content upgrade, including voice acting, and additional extras. The problem with this is that it would load from the UMD for nearly EVERYTHING. Considering the addition of FULL VOICE ACTING, this became problematic. It didn't even have the courtesy to load an entire conversation's worth of voices at once, either. An exchange that would go by in under thirty seconds had an addition of about five seconds to each line of loading.
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** With all four of the story-based add-on packs, Fallout has much the same problem as [[Oblivion]] (See above).
* ''[[Jade Empire]]'' was generally tolerable in its loading times, but during the Imperial Arena fights, after every win or loss the player was forced to sit through a loading time while the backstage area was loaded. Then another loading time before the next round could begin. In an otherwise highly polished game, this was an unexpected aggravation.
* ''[[The Last Remnant]]'' suffered quite terribly with long loading times when initiating combat or changing areas in the Xbox 360 version (well at least the 360 version provided a loading screen filled with gameplay hints although witnessing the same select number of hints over and over again does lose its appeal after an hour)the loading problems were partially averted in that you could install the game to the 360's hard drive but this only helped somewhat, more or less fully averted in the PC version provided you had a decent PC, loading times would be near instant or last around
* The [[PS 1]] port of ''[[Final Fantasy VI]]'' had this problem. It took
* The longer you play a character overall in the [[
** The Xbox 360 version has loads of loading as well. You could get something to eat and go to the bathroom (although not in that order) and get back before the loading screen finished.
* Similar to Red Alert, Evergrace has a load for every area transition AND room, but pads this out with [[They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot|extremely interesting background info, much of which is actually not in the game!]] The problem? They're only
=== [[Shoot'Em Up]] ===
* The Commodore 64 conversion of ''[[R-Type]]'' on tape. Roughly 5 minutes of loading to play. When you ran out of credits you had to wait another 5 minutes for it to load again even if you never advanced more than 5 screens into the game. It's one of those shooters where you have to memorise everything to get through, so this was very frustrating.
* Part of what made the Xbox 360 port of ''[[Do Don Pachi]] dai ou jou'' fail spectacularly was the excessive load times, even for ''menus.''
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=== [[Simulation Game]] ===
* ''[[The Sims]] 2''. Particularly if you have all the expansions and/or a large amount of custom content, though only for the initial loads or transitions. Once you're actually on a lot, there's no loading at all.
** The same applies to the original game. By the time of its release it brought an average system with 64-128MB RAM to its knees. Now try running it on a modern rig and you'll see that it literally takes seconds to load, other than the initial three to five-minute loading time for the game to set up the neighbourhoods.
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*** Although loading times were shorter if you were smart enough not to install the Bon Voyage EP which featured really boring exotic lands and was full of SecureROM [[Copy Protection]], anyway.
** The spinoff ''[[My Sims]]'' also falls victim to this, with load times stuck between every location change, which you do more often than you would think.
** The load screens in ''The Sims 2'' get bad enough that it can discourage some players from ever changing lots. Small wonder that ''The Sims 3'' made a selling point of averting this; you still have to sit through a loading screen when starting up the game, but it's much shorter than Sims 2 loading screens, and then you can have your Sims traipse all over the ''[[
*** Interestingly enough, ''3'' started to fall back into this as the first few expansions started piling up, especially if you had more than a couple pieces of downloaded content; cruising across the city too fast or at too great a height, you end up hitting "load walls" or seeing some REALLY crass graphics if not outright big gray boxes. Then along comes ''Late Night'', things get streamlined, and while the initial load seems longer there's virtually none once you're fully into the game.
** ''The Sims Social'' has a little fun with its loading screen, displaying random phrases like "Adding Spices" and "[[Predator|Getting to the Choppa]]". One of the phrases, appropriately enough, is "Loading Loading Screen".
* ''[[
** The PlayStation version of ''[[
** Any console port of ''[[
* The worst offender for the PSP was ''[[The Sims]] 2'', which stopped to load practically every 10 seconds, with loading in the middle of walking, loading during conversations, loading to access menus, loading to ''move the cursor'' in said menus...
* When ''[[Wing Commander (video game)|Wing Commander]] III'' was released in 1994, a cutting edge PC could take 10 minutes to load each mission. It became common practice to defrag the hard disk between every mission to improve the load times! Going from 8MB of RAM to 16MB dramatically improved the load times, but 16MB was an expensive luxury when this game came out.
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*** Please note that when you say "terrible", if you mean "slow", this is accurate. However, the C64's tape protocol, by far, was the most ''reliable'' of any other computer in that time period. With other computers, if the volume on the tape recorder was a little too high, or a little too low, or the tape recorder ran a little too fast or a little too slow, it often would have a load error. The C64, and all other Commodore computers for which tape was an option, never had any of those reliability problems.
* This trope looks particularly ridiculous when you consider ''[[Operation Flashpoint]]''. Despite being the first game that Bohemia Interactive released, it had technological advances which made - and still make - any game with long loading times look ridiculous. Because of behind-the-scenes loading, once you get into the game properly, there are absolutely no loading screens, which is made far more impressive by the fact that each of the islands in the game was on its own almost four times larger than the whole world map of ''The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion''.
* Start of ''[[Vega Strike]]'' (including precaching of resources) takes enough time to scrutinize [[Loading Screen
* ''[[Harvest Moon]]: Tree of Tranquility'' for the Wii. Exit a building - load screen. Enter a building - load screen. Enter a different area of town - load screen. Hell, change rooms in a larger building (like Town Hall or the Hotel) - load screen. The one blot on an otherwise excellent game.
** The sequel, ''Animal Parade'', has even MORE loading time due to the island being significantly larger.
** ''[[Rune Factory: Frontier]]'' suffers from this as well.
** The Playstation2 port of ''A Wonderful Life'' severely suffered from this as well. Actually, the entire game was significantly slower than it's Gamecube counter-part.
* [[
* ''[[Silent Hunter]] 3'' has quite longish loading times, but when you add GWX-mod to it, it takes FOREVER to load. It is 1,33 gigabytes file to download and it replaces basically everything in game, so it does not sound like it would increase loading times much. WRONG! It take 10 minutes to start a mission. I am not kidding. Maybe my Pentuim 4 with 1 gig of RAM is bit sluggish, but 10 minutes is still VERY long time to load. And the sad thing? That mod is VERY very good.
=== [[Sports Game]] ===
* ''Hot Shots Golf 5'' on the [[
** This is hardly the only [[
* An inversion in ''Madden 2004'' for the [[
=== [[Stealth Based Game]] ===
* The PC version of ''[[Splinter Cell]]: Double Agent'' had loading times for different sections in the menu. That's right: going from, say, "sound options" to "keyboard options", then "load game" ? That's 3 loading animations.
* ''[[Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater]]'' featured a short load every time you went into the pause menu. Ordinarily this wouldn't be too much of a problem but in order to take the stealth option you're required to change Naked Snake's camo in the pause menu quite often. Also, Naked Snake's food has to be accessed from the pause menu as well (failure to eat for an extended time results in lower stamina and a rumbling stomach which can alert nearby enemies; not something you'd want when sneaking up behind an enemy to slit his throat)
** Not in the HD version; although the HD version of ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]'' had a tiny but noticeable loading before every codec conversation and because the game switches between codec and cutscene quite often, it can get annoying. This does carry on to the HD version of 3 but it isn't as noticeable.
* ''[[Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots]]'' had a combined ''twenty-one minutes'' of watching Snake smoke. And this doesn't include the load times between stages, either. Once it's subverted, though - when the game starts loading {{spoiler|a completely different game}}.
** It works a lot like ''King's Quest: Mask of Eternity''. If a player proceeds linearly through the game on one save file, it's only 8 minutes when initially installing the game, then 13 minutes split over 10+ hours of gameplay. There are many PS3 games with worse initial install times than ''MGS4''. But then it gets ridiculous when you decide to restart the game and find out that that lengthy install process you start through the first time (minus the initial install)? Yeah, that didn't take. ''Every act'' has to be reinstalled when you get to it. So, from act 5 to act 1? That's an install. From act 4 to act 2 (earlier save)? That's an install. From 2 back to 4. Install. ''Ad nauseum''.
* ''[[Assassin's Creed]]'' is pretty good with its load times for the most part, except if you're playing on PC and want the game to quit to the desktop. To do that, you'll have to pause the game, pick the "exit" option in the menu, wait for the loading screen, exit the Animus and get up, pause the game again and select "quit", wait through another loading screen, sign in to your profile, and THEN finally make the game end itself. Thankfully, you can usually just hit Alt-F4 without fear of corrupting your save data.
=== [[Survival Horror]] ===
* The original ''[[Resident Evil]]'' game had the infamous "doors opening" sequences slotted in to try and mask the long loading times between rooms. Considering you were in a mansion, that's a ''lot'' of rooms.
** The N64 port of ''[[Resident Evil 2]]'' ran from a cartridge with virtually no load times. Previews of the game stated the doors would be kept "for atmosphere". The remake of the first game for the GameCube likewise all but eliminated these loading times. Playtesters complained that this felt unnatural, so they ''inserted'' the "doors opening" sequences and prolonged the transition between rooms.
** The really fun part of this is that when you {{spoiler|faced the hunters when you returned to the mansion}}, or when Nemesis launches yet another ambush in the third game, when you're at the Clock Tower shortly after Jill recovers from an earlier attack. These enemies (And Nemesis) could, under a couple of canned circumstances, ''destroy doors''. Or, as [[The Dark Id]] said in his ''[[Let's Play]]'' of ''[[Resident Evil 3: Nemesis]]'' - "By the Fires of Hades! The Nemesis is powerful enough to destroy loading screens. He can alter the very fabric of gameplay reality!"
** Again became relevant with the releases of ''Outbreak'' and ''File #2''. With a [[
** ''[[Resident Evil
* ''[[Dead Rising 2]]''. Every time you changed mall regions, there's a loading screen that takes
=== [[Third-Person Shooter]] ===
* ''[[Total Overdose]]'' on the [[
* ''[[Army of Two]]'' for the Xbox 360 has acceptable loading times during play, spaced very far apart. The menu is a different story. Starting the game from the title screen OR changing your loadout mid-mission both subject you to menu screens that, while slickly animated, take far too much time to load. And of course each selection will bring you to a submenu, with its own page and therefore its own loading period... times two if you're playing co-op. Oh, and don't screw up. Then you get to start over again.
* ''[[Postal]] 2'' initially suffered from long loading times. It was near-immediately patched, [[So Bad It's Good|but it was still too late to get a decent review score.]]
* The [[
* Nearly all the of Playstation ''[[Tomb Raider]]'' games suffered from loading times in a variety of ways. If you were prone to being killed a lot (and you most likely would due to the series' [[Everything Trying to Kill You]] plus pitfalls), you had to wait for the menu to pop up, which took about a second or two if you tried to skip the death sequence, choose to reload your last save, and then wait for the level to reload. While it is understandable that loading a level for the first time can take a while, the game still takes at least 10 to 15 seconds just to reload your previous save state as if the game simply "forgot" how everything was up to that point.
** In those same games, going through your inventory was also prone to short pauses (about 1 to 2 seconds) to bring it up and another 3 seconds to play the "use item" animation in the menu (only in the first 3 games) before returning to the game and the item gets used. If you go through your items a lot, expect a lot of short pauses.
=== [[Turn-Based Strategy]] ===
* ''[[Worms]]: Open Warfare 2'' on the DS has the dubious honor of managing to have this on a cartridge-based game. You have several seconds of loading between each play, even when you ''restart'' a map where the landscape is indestructible (most puzzle maps). That makes it quite annoying when you fail the same puzzle or Laboratory a few times.
** Worms Armageddon on the Playstation takes so long that when you wake up in the morning, '''IT WILL STILL SAY LOADING'''.
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=== [[Wide Open Sandbox]] ===
* ''[[Just Cause (video game)|Just Cause 2]]'' very impressively averts this (partially), as it streams the content rather than "loads" it. There are absolutely no loading times when traversing the game's world, letting the player cross all of the 391-square-mile game map without a single load time. Starting and restarting missions, respawning, and being "extracted" (teleporting) to far away locations understandably includes short loading times, however.
* ''[[Playstation Home]]'', the [[
** It has gotten a lot better though with patch 1.35. It completely changed the way the character logs in, replaces the abysmally slow World Map with a much-faster Navigator screen, and now it takes about a quarter of what it used to take to load an area.
* ''[[Roblox]]'' can sometimes have this on more elaborate places. Fortunately, it shows you what it has loaded, and tells you how many bricks/connectors have been made. You can even zoom in and change angles while loading!
* A simply demonic inversion: ''[[Grand Theft Auto IV]]'''s "sea of brown" glitch on PC. The game simply stopped loading.... anything... but ''the game kept going''. So you find yourself driving on thin air with nothing but a brown ocean to look at, when you suddenly hit a wall that you cannot see. Thank goodness they patched it.
* ''[[Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas]]'' for the [[
** While the ability to buy and change CJ's clothes is awesome, it takes ''forever''. You choose the piece of clothing from a menu, CJ goes into the dressing room, takes about five to ten seconds to load his changed character model, and then comes out and does a "checking out my duds" animation that takes another few seconds. Then, you choose whether to buy or wear it or not, and CJ either just goes back into the dressing room or does a "hot damn!" pose that takes another few seconds. Repeat for every single item you select. And if you've got a lot of money, and want to buy every item a store has... well, you'll probably be able to read the manual from front to back in the time it takes to do this.
*** Averted with the PC version, which loads pretty fast whatever you do.
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=== Consoles ===▼
▲== Consoles ==
* The Commodore C64 was the king of this trope. Long load times were actually ''inherent'' to the design - the floppy drive went from having four data lines in the original design to ''one'' by the time of release, due to [[Executive Meddling]] in the name of [[They Just Didn't Care|"simplicity"]], ''quadrupling'' the load times already inflicted by the floppy format. Tapes were even worse. Ironically, the C64 could run games from cartridges, eliminating load times altogether, but nobody actually used that feature. If you plan on playing any C64 games, do it in an emulator with turbo mode.
** Since this was such an obvious problem, it was also acknowledged: many tape games came with loading sequence graphics and music (that eventually expanded into the original [[Demoscene]]), crude audio mixers for you to create own loading tunes and even some mini-games to keep you busy for the duration of the loading event. Modern games no longer have such features, due to Namco's [http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=5718632.PN.&OS=PN/5718632&RS=PN/5718632 5,718,632] patent on it. It expires on November 27, 2015.
* The original [[
** Both systems could be modified to run entire games off a HDD, obliterating load times and removing the need to get up and swap discs.
*** The [[
*** The [[Xbox 360]] officially integrated this feature in a firmware update - though it requires that the disc for the game you wish to play be in the DVD drive to function [[Digital Piracy Is Evil|to prevent the rampant piracy]] that often resulted with modded [[
**** This is because the 360, like the original Xbox before it, has dedicated "cache space" on the hard drive. If a game gets a full install, then it may still try to use that cache space - but instead of copying from the disc drive to the HDD (in which case the two drives can operate simultaneously), it's copying from the HDD to the same HDD (and the read/write operations can't happen at the same time). Programmers could, in theory, tweak their games to disable caching for full installs (in which case there'd be a hands-down performance improvement), but the ''Halo 3'' coders did their work before such installs were possible (and have no apparent interest in releasing a patch).
* [[
** People have gone as far to install custom firmware on their PSPs (not only voiding the warranty, but requiring hard to find devices if you don't already know someone who has already done it), rip their games from the UMD, put them on relatively expensive high-capacity and speed Memory Sticks, and run them off of them just to alleviate the load times. Although it is fun to watch ''[[Crisis Core]]'' load faster than the load screen can be displayed.
*** Sony seems to have done this as well - their latest system, the PSP Go, does not have a UMD drive. Instead, all games are loaded off of memory sticks. But your old UMD library? Worthless. You have to buy the games again.
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** This specifically resulted from the Sega CD using a ''single''-speed CD-ROM drive, as this was before CD-ROM technology was affordable or advanced. The Neo Geo CD also used one, and is similarly notorious for atrocious loading times that get worse the newer and bigger the game is. Good luck trying to play ''The Last Blade'' on it.
*** [[Neo Geo]] CD. For games where it only had to load each level, like ''[[Aero Fighters]] 3'' or ''[[Metal Slug]]'', it was okay. For fighting games, it'd take about half a minute for each fight. For ''[[The King of Fighters]]'' games, it took the same time for each ''round''.
** Single speed on the Sega CD was better than the double speed on the Saturn and [[
* The [[Wii]] has this. Not a specific game on the Wii, the programs on the Wii itself. There's fairly ridiculous load times just to browse the shop channel, along with some of the other online functions, such as videos on the Nintendo Channel (why does it only buffer when you reach the point that the video has loaded up to so far, and then stop after a few seconds?).
** Explainable in some of the cases, like the shop channel, which is really just a glorified website (which, due to the fact that you could connect to it from a PC before Nintendo started requiring authentication, means it's not stored locally, and websites do take time to transfer and load). It would not surprise me if some of the other channels are the same way, and given what I know about the Wii's software layout, is likely the better choice over having it take up precious space in the 512MB NAND flash memory that also stores channels, saves, and the various OSes?
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*** The Wii also has a relatively puny amount of RAM (A measly 88MB). That's about as much memory as you'd find in a PC back in the late 90's. This maximized the need to swap data in and out of RAM a lot.
* An obscure 7th-generation console system called called the HyperScan pulled out C64 loading times. HyperScan was an attempt to [[X Meets Y|join]] [[Collectible Card Game]] [[X Meets Y|and]] [[Videogame Systems|console]] into one but failed miserably.
* Nintendo went out of their way to avert this, particularly notably with the [[Nintendo 64]], which continued to use cartridges long after they would otherwise have been rendered obsolete by CDs, simply because the load times were significantly less (and they were much harder to pirate). The same is true, to a lesser extent, of the [[Nintendo
* Spectrum games were loaded from tapes, so you had to go through about half an hour of odd colour patterns and noise until you got to the game proper. And then there were these odd cases where you had to run both sides of the tape, or stop at specific points and continue running them later after some level... Kids today complain about a few seconds, what do they know...
** Amstrad CPC games were also usually sold on tapes. Frequently, about a quarter of the loading time would consist of ''loading the loading screen''.
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**** There was a ''[[Street Fighter 2]]'' port on the Spectrum that took around 45 minutes to load the character select screen. It then took 45 minutes or so to load the actual, 2 minute maximum fight. Fight over, it then took 45..... you get the idea.
** [http://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=53846 Here]'s a creative use of Spectrum tape loading time.
* Speaking of [[Dance Dance Revolution]] (DDR)... [[Konami]] is notorious for insanely long boot times in their arcade games. System573-based games usually take 10+ minutes to boot up. When they switched DDR to [[
** Konami's M2 arcade games suffer from slow CD loading, which is probably one reason why the console version of the M2 became [[Vaporware]].
===
* [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5oh7qTbFYQ "On The PC"], [[Filk Song|Filker]] [[Tom Smith]]'s [[Song Parody|parody]] of "Under The Sea" from ''[[The Little Mermaid]]'', has this spoken passage near its end:
* Non-gaming example: [[Blu Ray]]. If you take the ratio between the resolution of DVDs vs. Blu-ray, then multiply a DVD's loading time by that ratio, you don't get anywhere near the actual time a lower-end Blu-ray player takes to load a movie. DRM?▼
{{quote|''Loading final chorus, please wait...
<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Beat]]]
''Insert disk two...
<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Beat]]]
''Thousand...
<nowiki>[</nowiki>[[Beat]]]
''And three.}}
=== Technology ===
▲* Non-gaming example: [[Blu
** Each Blu-Ray disc is actually a (relatively) complicated Java program for running the movie and the menus (graphics, sound and all), and that definitely increases the load times since you're actually loading a program. It's a similar case with a PC with poor performance - it'll take way longer to load programs.
=== [[Web Comics]] ===
* Parodied on ''[[The Way of the Metagamer]]'' with [http://wayofthemetagamer.thecomicseries.com/comics/pl/18721 this ridiculously slow loading bar].
* ''[[Penny Arcade]]'' entered the world with [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1998/11/18/ a stab] at ''Sin''{{'}}s long load times. ''Sin''{{'}}s load times were nasty when first released, but a later patch shortened them greatly.
** They also [http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/2/6/ took a stab at] ''[[Devil May Cry]] 4''{{'}}s 20-minute initial install time on the PS3.
* Parodied in ''[[Homestuck]]'' in regard to its Flash animations/games:
{{quote|[http://mspaintadventures.com/?s{{=}}6&p{{=}}003587 You spend the next twenty minutes staring at this image before you realize it's not a Flash file].}}
=== [[Web Original]] ===
* Stuart K. Reilly, a [[
* [[Homestar Runner]] knows [https://web.archive.org/web/20131027155236/http://www.homestarrunner.com/loadingscreens.html What Everyone Will Be Talkin Abrat!]
{{quote|'''Strong Bad:'''' Is this cartoon seriously just all the loading screens?}}
* Flash cartoons/games in general almost always have "preloaders" that halt the play of the file until it has been fully downloaded. Preloaders that start the video before the loading is done based on the estimated connection speed, similar to the buffering that [[Internet Video|video player panes]] do, are theoretically possible but very rarely used.
=== [[Real Life]] ===
* [[The Internet]]. In some cases, an unstable internet connection will cause certain browsers to think they're still loading when the connection is already broken.
** There is also browsers that reload when something does break, which makes it seem as if the browser is trolling the user, as the user can SEE all the content they want/need in the background behind the 'now reloading' message, but can't access it. This typically occurs most with news sites, as the site itself and the video or article the user might want loads properly, then you start reading/watching ....and then an ad way at the bottom you can't see that always fails to loads keeps kicking the restart button.
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[[Category:Loads And Loads Of Loading]]
[[Category:Self-Demonstrating Article]]
[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]
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