Ridiculous Loading Times
I once read a review that said you could count the number of seconds of loading time on one hand in Sony's God of War (PS2). The PS2 has notoriously bad loading times, so I didn't see how this was possible...but after playign the entire game, I had to say it was true. The sum total off all my loading times probabaly added up to 5 seconds over 10 or 12 hours of playing the game. Wow! That definitely contributed to fun of that action-packed masterpiece.
Loading times ruin games. Check out this absurd video of the loading times in THQ's Smackdown vs. Raw 2006 (PSP). I hope this is a joke, but somehow I think it's real.
February 27th, 2006 at 4:40 pm
OMG!!! I feel that 7 min. of my life have been stolen from me… I can’t imagine actually owning this title! You should put a warning up… like “if you don’t believe me, you can see the video for yourself, but trust me, its really just a 7 min series of load screens.”
February 27th, 2006 at 4:50 pm
Using Google Video with WordPress is way harder than it has any right to be. In Drupal I just pasted in Google’s “put on site” text and it worked. In WordPress I need a plugin, have to add special tags, have to edit the “put on site” text to include only the url, and after all that, the link is still broken if you are viewing the “blog” (from the navigation bar at the top of the page). I think it’s broken because the the quotes inside the tag are being displayed as smart quotes, rather than straight quotes.
After following this thread: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/57167
and adding that ninja extra line to some secret file, it still didn’t work. You think loading times are ridiculous? Try using Google Video with WordPress!
Note: I would have made the above URL a link if I had a handy “make link” button when typing comments. I guess I need another two or three plugins to get that going.
–Sirlin
Edit: Looks like WordPress automatically made the above url a link. Too bad the comments field has no easy way to highlight some words and make it a link, though.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:01 pm
Yeah, the PSP’s always had crappy loading time.
February 27th, 2006 at 8:12 pm
The amazing thing is that I’ve seen a video where a guy beat Mario 3 in 11 minutes. Less time than it takes to load 2 levels of that then.
February 28th, 2006 at 3:13 am
This is completely retarded and totally unacceptable.
I have ONE game that used to have loading issues, and that game is Postal 2. When it came out, the loading times were ridiculously long, and the game got very bad feedback because of it. They *did* fix it with a patch. I guess that would be out of the question with a PSP.
March 1st, 2006 at 7:30 am
I think the video is faked, when you look at the miliseconds ticking away they only go up to 2. I’m not sure exactly how it was done but I think this video has been stretched to seem longer.
March 1st, 2006 at 10:48 am
The time displayed by the video seems pretty well in sync with the timer in the google display at the bottom. I’ve seen some bad loading times before, like in NFL Blitz…I find it very believable that this is real. I kind of wish it wasn’t, but that’s life.
March 2nd, 2006 at 1:57 am
What is going on with this video? First it worked normally, then it wouldn’t play anymore from my site. The reason is that that particular link was removed from Google Video. So I linked a different version of the same video and that worked, fine. Now that one is gone too. The original video came from youtube, and that one is also gone. Looks like THQ wrote some lawyer letters. If anyone has this video hosted somewhere or saved somewhere, let me know.
–Sirlin
March 2nd, 2006 at 9:00 am
i don’t know but the video works fine right now.
March 2nd, 2006 at 10:22 pm
The Mario vid where he beat it was fake. I think it was played in 1.5 times speed and had a cheat or something. I’m too lazy to look into it now.
March 3rd, 2006 at 12:38 am
It wasn’t “Fake”, it was a Perfect Run. People who didn’t know what that meant flipped out about about it. It probably wasn’t cheats, as those aren’t allowed for such runs. But it was a lot of save stating.
if I recall he did it over the course of a year.
Anyways, Wrestling Games — particularly THQ ones not made by AKI — have always had terrible loaidng times and inefficiencies. That said, there are faster ways to get into a match then that — he took the long route. Story mode has more loading screens than a normal match. Even then, it’s still terrible. Especially since the story mode is supposed to be the main draw of the games.
March 4th, 2006 at 5:38 pm
#6 Matt, that’s because they are frames, not miliseconds. Time is counted that way in video editing, in TV and stuff.
These guys completely lost any sense of what they were doing. They basically render their game unplayable.
March 4th, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Nintendo’s always been nuts about loading times. It was one of the big reasons they used smaller discs on the Gamecube.
Take Mario Kart Double Dash for example. After the startup screen, there is almost no loading times. They don’t even pause to load races. It’s quite scary.
March 7th, 2006 at 7:16 am
i don’t play this game so i don’t care/
March 17th, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Is this so hard to confirm? Because it looks ridiculous, and anyoe who would sit through that more than once is insane. BF2 takes less than a minute to load on my ancient PC. There’s no excuse for what goes on in that video, or for the imeciles who didn’t send the game back to design.
March 20th, 2006 at 3:35 am
I just have the feeling that your video is fake.
March 20th, 2006 at 11:22 am
Heh, that’s ALMOST a tenth as bad as Finding Nemo. I remember I almost beat Sonic Advance one whole time while waiting for ONE level to load in that game.
March 20th, 2006 at 8:26 pm
BTW, from Nintendo loading times, if Mario Kart Double Dash!! Has got scary small loading times, try Metroid Prime(s). A VERY large place, no loadings. You see, in those games, the games engine “Secretly” loads the game all the time. And you can see that in small things, like making a New Player etc.
March 28th, 2006 at 8:08 am
actually, metroid prime DOES have a few loading issues, though as most would note they are very minimal. If you watch speed runs of that game, or even play it yourself, you’ll notice that there are times when a door is shot to open it but it does not immediately open. This is because the next room has not yet loaded, and the game forces you to wait the few seconds it takes to finish loading that room before the door itself opens. However, that’s definitely not the same as a loadng screen (though when you’re trying to get through with 5 space priates shooting at your ass it may seem more annoying) and is certainyl more fluid, it does occasionally become bothersome.
As for the video, I’d definitely believe it. Some of my friends really like THQ’s wrestling games, and while not nearly as bad as the PSP version shown there, the loading times on the N64 and Gamecube versions (No Mercy and Day of Reckoning) are quite a pain.
March 31st, 2006 at 1:01 am
Re the SMB run: It’s called a tool-assisted speed run. You can find more of them for other games on sites like this one: http://bisqwit.iki.fi/nesvideos/
Basically, they use save states and rewinds to do a “perfect” run-through of a game, better than is humanly possible.
About load times: I have to believe this video is real. Load times have skyrocketed in recent years. Playing Black & White on this old clunker of a PC gives me massive load times (though not nearly as bad as *that*). That video is funny and scary at the same time.
April 1st, 2006 at 1:43 pm
it is possible because my cousin takes 13 mins to pull it off
but he is absolutely brilliant in games like that but as soon as he hits fighting games he gets the floor mopped with him
how can people not accept it if they themselves can not achieve it people that can not believe stuff are people that will never be good at video games
April 6th, 2006 at 11:55 am
Actually, he posted it on his own site and explained that he used an emulator and save states, rewinds, etc. He actually explained the whole process before. I’m not doubting your cousins ability to do it in 13 min., but if you had actually seen the other video, the inhumanly perfect motion is at times impossible in the sense that things that cannot be predicted in the game were predicted quite often (does that make sense?). I can’t run a 3, 4, even a 5 min mile, but I wouldn’t doubt that there is someone else who can (that’s partially because I’m an engineer, not an athlete). But it is easy to edit video to make someone look like they ran a mile quite fast, understand?
May 3rd, 2006 at 7:40 am
“I think the video is faked, when you look at the miliseconds ticking away they only go up to 2. I’m not sure exactly how it was done but I think this video has been stretched to seem longer.”
It’s not a millisecond counter. It’s a frame counter. It only goes up to 29 because you’re generally counting frames for TV broadcast which is 30 full frames per second, or 60 interlaced frames per second.
July 8th, 2006 at 12:58 am
Good Grief! That is some ridiculous loading time. The worst part is that much of the loading time is spent loading pointless things, like the WWE logo, that five second clip of whatsherface taking a few steps, or the “interaction” scene. Oh yeah, and loading the LOAD SCREEN!
~Avatar Z
July 8th, 2006 at 5:04 am
*Bleeds internaly* My GOD! Ah… But at least the game is otherwise fine, look at Lord of the rings: the fellowship of the ring. That made me hemorage… so close and I crashed at moria and hadn’t saved in 12 minutes… thus losing alot of progress. And the unbearably slow battles…
July 8th, 2006 at 6:45 am
7 minutes of loading….and the psp already has horrible battery life…
October 24th, 2006 at 11:05 pm
Hahaha, that video was so damn funny :D
December 13th, 2006 at 11:24 am
Here is the mario 3 run, done by an actual person on a console and verified as being 100% legal http://speeddemosarchive.com/Mario3.html
December 14th, 2006 at 6:27 am
I agree with you wholeheartedly that loading times ruin games .But what can really be done? after all one cannot have every thing .Developers should do their best that is all that can be done.
Don Lapre is a Superstar
webmaster@j-ams.org
www.j-ams.org
September 10th, 2008 at 2:12 pm
:o
That’s crazy! I’m glad I don’t have that.