Loads and Loads of Loading: Difference between revisions

{{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]]''}}

 

 

''"Whensoever games are loaded off disk, whether that be a floppy, a hard drive, or some kind of [[Blu Ray]] thing, there will be games that take longer to load than to play."''

 

 

Ah, [[Loading Screen|Loading Screens]]. How we loathe them, and yet how common they are. However, those are not the subject of this trope. This trope is about games that take too damn long to load, and do so not just at startup, but the entire time you're playing the game.

 

 

This is something of a cyclic trope because of technology changes. Computer gamers of the 1980s learned to loathe the slow-as-molasses tape and floppy disk drives of that era, and cheered when they were replaced by the much faster hard disks. But it didn't take too awfully long for games to take advantage of increasing disk size and grow so big that they took as long to load from the hard disk as their ancestors did from floppies. Solid state cartridges from the old days had fast random access times that some cases match or is faster than ram(snes), but their severely limited capacity increases the temptation to use data compression in larger modern games, which can take a ''very'' long time to decompress on a game console. So it goes...

 

 

It can help when hard drives grow larger. This not only allows them to store more of the game's data, which will usually load faster from the hard drive than from an optical disc, but also allows them to use uncompressed storage, which takes a lot less work from the CPU to load. However compressed data can be faster load and decompressed than to use uncompressed data on a optical drive. So it's a double sword on weaker systems.

 

 

No relation to [[The Load]], though that may be what you call games suffering from this. Point of advice: Bring a book for some of these. Preferably, [[Doorstopper|a thick one you can put]]

 

 

[[Doorstopper|down quickly.]] See also [[Dynamic Loading]], when loading sequences are performed "behind the scenes" and (hopefully) go unnoticed by the player.

 

 

 

== [[Fighting Game]] ==

 

 

 

== [[Platform Game]] ==

** Be grateful that ''Wasteland'' came on disk and not tape. Also, some hardware solutions (like ''[[Jiffy DOS]] 6.0'', which I had) would speed up the load times to just a few seconds.

* ''[[Digimon World]] 4'' had loading screens between the different areas ''in one world!'' It wasn't quite as bad as ''Sonic the Hedgehog 2006,'' but it still made the game nigh-unplayable for this Digimon Fanboy. Want a sandwich? ''I made it while waiting for the next area to load.''

* ''Digimon World 3'' was also pretty bad. In what seems like an attempt to streamline the loading process when the player enters a new area, the area loads as you traverse the area. Naturally, on a particularly slow day, you can be trapped with only a few blocks of visible space to wander through, lest you venture through the glitchy areas beneath the loading boxes.

* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic|KOTOR 2]]'' had appalling loading times sometimes. Due to the areas that were being loaded being rather large this was not very bothersome. However, whenever your character had to go back and forth between areas it could take a long time

* Something the [[Technology Marches On|parents of small children didn't have until the late 1990's]], was children's websites not loading in time for impatient children, or the connection hanging at the wrong moment.

 

 

 

 

 

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''...[[Shaggy Dog Story|LOAD ERROR! PLEASE RESTART.]]...''