Loads and Loads of Loading: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

{{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]]''}}

''...{{color|#ee1100|LOADING}}...''

 

 

''...{{color|#ee1100|LOADING}}...''

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

 

{{examples}}

== Video Game Examples ==

** 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.

** 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.

*** Shadow Man for N64 did have short loading screens for areas, though it was also a rather large game that was originally made for the PC and had very little content cut out for the N64.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.

* 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...

** 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.

 

 

=== [[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...

** However, the update itself takes about an hour to install...

 

 

* ''[[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.

* ''[[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.

* 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)

 

=== [[Fighting Game]] ===

** And then there is ''Smackdown vs RAW 2007'', which would have multiple loading screens in a row.

** So did ''SvR 2006'', and the [[PlayStation 2]] version wasn't much better about it, either.

* 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.

** 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.

** ''[[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 [[PlayStation]] ports of early ''[[Capcom vs. Whatever|"VS."]]'' series fighting games (namely ''[[X-Men]] VS. [[Street Fighter]]'', ''Marvel Superheroes VS. [[Street Fighter]]'' and '' Marvel VS. Capcom'') also saw gratuitous loading, enough so that the gameplay suffered horribly. Such gameplay sacrifices include only 2 unique characters for 2P VS (one unique with the other two used by your opponent), long load times in between matches, and near-dead stops during the fights, especially for very graphic-intensive [[Limit Break|super combos]]. Luckily, the Dreamcast came out just in time for Capcom to develop an arcade-perfect version of ''Marvel vs. Capcom'' (although they still released a load-happy PSX version alongside it), and its sequel was developed on a Dreamcast-only arcade board, rendering these issues obsolete.

** ''Calamity Trigger Portable'' had them as well, but really, what do you expect from UMD?

 

 

*** 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!

* ''[[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.

 

 

* In ''[[EverQuest]]'', there were some people who were called "slow zoners." These slow zoners just took a great deal of time watching a "loading" screen. Sometimes, up to 4 minutes. If said slow zoner was also a dual clienter (playing 2 clients in same computer... perfectly legal if you owned both accounts) loading time could get up to 10 or 15 minutes, making this, maybe, the most extreme example.

** 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.

** 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.

 

=== Pinball ===

 

 

 

=== [[Platform Game]] ===

** 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.

* ''[[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.

* ''Conker: Live and Reloaded'', the Xbox [[Video Game Remake|remake]] of ''[[Conker's Bad Fur Day]]'', suffered heavily from this, especially in contrast to the cartridge-based original. Even the opening cutscene had up to four separate, thirty-second load sequences!

** 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.

** 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''...

* In Spongebob Squarepants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman for the [[PlayStation 2]], there is a loading screen for just about everything. And god help you if you get the dreaded double loading with the first screen having Spongebob holding a hourglass and the second with bubbles slowly filling the screen, then you can finally start the next area/room. Made even worse if you enter the wrong room and have to go back, going through effectively four load screens for nothing.

 

* 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.

* ''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.

 

=== [[Real Time Strategy]] ===

** 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 & Conquer]]: Generals'' had a loading bar before showing the main menu. Especially annoying when you wanted to quit the game, since you had to load it first. [[Good Bad Bugs|Or you could just hit Alt+F4]].

* ''[[Warhammer Fantasy Battle]]: Mark of Chaos'' has actual load times (complete with prompt) before A LOADING SCREEN. Repeatedly.

** 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]] ===

** Not to mention the [[PlayStation 2]] version of Guitar Hero III's saving times. It takes about ''4 minutes'' to save the game where the previous games took about 20 seconds. It's not like it's a really large file that it's saving; it's 325 kb, while [[Devil May Cry]] 3 has 364 kb save files, yet doesn't take nearly as long.

* ''[[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.

** 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.

 

 

* 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.

* ''[[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.

* ''[[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 [[PlayStation]] 1 than the [[PlayStation 2]] it was released on. They even managed to put up a loading screen when getting out of combat. And worst of all was when you'd be inside a dungeon, and the combat area would only take up about half of the screen.

** 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.

** 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 [[PlayStation 2]] RPG. The world map is incredibly large and detailed, but loading times are the tradeoff. What's more, there are actually ''three'' world maps - one on foot, one on boat and one from the air. If you got off your boat at the wrong place by accident, it could take you over 30 seconds to get back on and start sailing again. And there's no loading animation; the screen is just plain black.

** 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.

* ''[[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.

** 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.

** The load times being especially awful when you were in the desert.

* A little-known [[PlayStation 2]] game called ''[[Okage]]: Shadow King'' was utterly destroyed by its load times. The story was interesting, the characters were fun, the graphics were interesting, and the gameplay was fairly standard RPG fare. Unfortunately, the game was riddled with loading screens, such as between major areas, going into buildings, going into different rooms in the same building... This wasn't helped by the fact that you often had no clue where to go and exploring to find your next clue was a major part of the gameplay.

* 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.

** 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).

* ''[[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.

** 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 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.

 

 

*** 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.

*** 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 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.

*** 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''.

* ''[[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]] ===

* An inversion in ''Madden 2004'' for the [[PlayStation 2]] at least, where there were loads and loads of ''saving''. If the music wasn't playing while it was going on, you'd think the game froze.

 

* 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.

 

 

=== [[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.

** 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.

** 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.

 

 

=== 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.

** 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 [[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 [[PlayStation 2]] and [[Xbox]] consoles. This can still be quite handy should the DVD drive start to fail as it requires much less work from it. However, some games actually ''slow down'' when played off the hard drive. ''[[Halo 3]]'', in particular, outright calls people that install the game to their hard drives idiots.

**** 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).

* 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 [[PlayStation 2]]-based hardware, it only got worse -- ''Supernova'' can take up to half an hour. By comparison, ''[[Pump It Up]] Exceed 1'' takes... about 15 seconds.

** Konami's M2 arcade games suffer from slow CD loading, which is probably one reason why the console version of the M2 became [[Vaporware]].

 

 

=== [[Web Comics]] ===

* Parodied on ''[[The Way of the Metagamer]]'' with [http://wayofthemetagamer.thecomicseries.com/comics/pl/18721 this ridiculously slow loading bar].

* 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]] ===

{{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.