History Main / LoadsAndLoadsofLoading

** People often install custom firmware on their [=PSPs=], rip their games from the UMD in .iso format, 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 ''VideoGame/CrisisCore'' load faster than the load screen can be displayed. Ripped games can in .iso format or .cso format- .cso files are much smaller, helpful for those with smaller memory sticks, but take significantly longer to load than .iso's. Sony seems to have done this as well - 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. This was retroactively made an option for older [=PSPs=] too. Unfortunately, it also means that to do this, you need to invest in a few extra large memory sticks. And yes, you'll need to buy the games again even if you already own it on UMD; Sony's not giving you an option to trade in your physical UMD for downloadable content.
** PSP load times do seem to be getting better, by and large. As an example, ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyTactics: [[UpdatedRerelease War of the Lions]]'' loads faster than the original PSX release.

* In ''Spongebob Squarepants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman'' for the [=PS2=], there is a loading screen for everything. And god help you if you get the dreaded double loading with the first screen having Spongebob holding an 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.

* ''VideoGame/GraffitiKingdom'' 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.

* ''VideoGame/TalesOfTheAbyss'' 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. Oddly, this loading problem only existed in the US version for whatever reason (never has been proven, but believed to be poor coding when re-inserting the translated dialogue). The Japanese version's load times are less than 1/3 of the US's.

** The ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' games do this for travel between areas, but now individual rooms also have to be loaded. The 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 [[VideoGame/MetroidPrime the original NTSC release of the first game]], liable to crash it if overtaxed. Some of the room loads in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' 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. The load times greatly improve on the digital version of the ''Metroid Prime Trilogy'' compilation, making most doors open instantly after shooting them and load times via elevators take about 5 to 7 seconds at most. This is mostly due to the games being directly on the hard drive (UsefulNotes/WiiU) instead of having to load from a UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube or UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} disc.

* World Software's beat 'em ups on the Amiga, like ''VideoGame/FrankoTheCrazyRevenge'' and ''Doman: Grzechy Ardana'' have it quite bad with the frequency of the load times, with the typical loop consisting of you traveling through a handful of steps forward in the stage until the game would pause to load a further part of the stage and usually at least one to three enemies to fight just after the loading. This is actually a consequence of the developer's artist's preference to not using tiles for designing stage graphics "in order to avoid repetition".

* The [=PS3=] version of ''VideoGame/LollipopChainsaw'' falls victim to this. Loading screens usually last for 30-45 seconds, sometimes more, sometimes less. They can get really aggravating if you're trying to speedrun the game and are skipping all cutscenes to do so, because the game has to load the cutscene, then when you skip the cutscene, you have to sit through ''another'' loading screen.

** The ''VideoGame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' games do this for travel between areas, but now individual rooms also have to be loaded. The 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 [[VideoGame/MetroidPrime the original NTSC release of the first game]], liable to crash it if overtaxed -- a serious problem for speed runners. Some of the room loads in ''VideoGame/MetroidPrime3Corruption'' 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. The load times greatly improve on the digital version of the ''Metroid Prime Trilogy'' compilation, making most doors open instantly after shooting them and load times via elevators take about 5 to 7 seconds at most. This is mostly due to the games being directly on the hard drive (UsefulNotes/WiiU) instead of having to load from a UsefulNotes/NintendoGameCube or UsefulNotes/{{Wii}} disc.

* ''VideoGame/DwarfFortress'': Usually the delays are just increasing lag, but certain events can end up this way due to too much to process at one time, particularly when spring arrives and everything thaws, or winter arrives and everything freezes; the exact moment the temperature hits 0 Celsius, you'll have to wait a couple minutes until your computer's done choking the sudden change down. The worst, however, is world generation. Small worlds aren't too much trouble, but generating anything large past a hundred years or so can take ''several hours'' if you aren't careful.

** The original ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil'' game had the infamous "doors opening" sequences slotted in to try and mask the long loading times between rooms, as well as being a nod to ''VideoGame/SweetHome'''s introduction. Considering you were in a mansion, that's a ''lot'' of rooms.

* ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'' has maps divided in numbered zones (ranging from 9 to 12 depending on the case). Whenever you walk into a new zone, the game loads the new zone. This leads to very annoying gathering missions in which you have to run all around the map searching for a place to mine/fish/collect herbs/etc. However, after the first missions, when you start hunting bigger monsters, you change zones less frequently, though if you're searching for the monster, you will have to watch a few loading screens. Even so, there are still lengthy times for when a quest is being loaded, for the quest reward screen after completing a mission ''and'' when the player returns to the village or guild headquarters afterwards.
* ''VideoGame/MonsterHunter'' 4U has its own issues, as the game desperately needs the faster processor provided by the New 3DS. ''Staring the game itself'' on an old model can take upwards of a minute, and it takes just as long to close. Pausing also incurs two ten to fifteen second loads, though this may have something to do with the fact that the game can ''only'' be paused by using the home button and bringing up the 3DS main menu or by closing the 3DS entirely. That's ten seconds to go out to the console menu, another 10 seconds to go back into the game itself, and another few seconds while the game pops up the actual pause screen so you can resume the game. Thankfully, normal gameplay rarely has loads of more than a second or two.

* ''VideoGame/GhostRecon: Future Soldier'', like ''Max Payne 3'', uses unskippable cutscenes in lieu of loading screens.

* ''VideoGame/GuiltyGear -STRIVE-'' has a relatively smooth experience except when it first loads the game. The game needs to connect to the servers first, a process which can take over ''two minutes'' to complete. This is apparently because the game is calling the Japanese servers 127 times and creating a connection with ''every'' one of of those calls, which needs to make 4 round trips for each of them. A modder detected the problem and created a [[https://github.com/optix2000/totsugeki#the-technical-nitty-gritty fix]] for it, cutting the load times to a quarter. Later patches have reduced the startup load time significantly, although it's still much longer than most comparable titles.

* ''VideoGame/MickeyMania'' on the SNES is another example, in spite of being on a cartridge. Before the start of each level, you get a screen showing Mickey staring at his watch for a few seconds. However, this does not happen on the Sega Genesis version of the game.

** Accessing Wiki/ThisVeryWiki with your PSP will take long to load sometimes.

** The original [=IEE488=] interface used on the Commodore [=PET=] was expensive to implement, and required equally expensive and clunky cables that were only available from a few sources, so they tried to design a simpler, lower-cost serial interface for the [=VIC-20=]. Unfortunately, they discovered at the last minute that there was a flaw in one of the serial-bus chips they'd used, and the only way to ship on schedule was to intentionally slow down the data rate far enough that the flaw wouldn't occur. Once that was done, [[StatusQuoIsGod backwards compatibility]] dictated that even after they fixed the flaw in the chips, every computer and disk drive made after that ''still'' had to run at the same glacial speeds so the drives would still be compatible with the million-plus [=VIC-20s=] already sold and shipped, and so that [=VIC-20=] users could upgrade to the [=C=64=] without having to replace their $400+ disk drives too.

* The online smartphone game ''VideoGame/MarvelContestOfChampions'' can be known to suffer from this, and it may be exacerbated a little more if you're not playing it on the best hardware, and/or don't have a strong Internet connection. For starters, you'll need to sit through a loading screen to enter or exit the crystals room, or a battle map. But that doesn't compare to the sheer number of loading screens you'll have to go through when you're playing on the main campaign. ''Every time'' you stop to engage an opponent on the way in a battle map, you need ''two'' loading screens to get to the actual fight, with the first loading screen being used to bring up the screen where you choose which character in your squad you want to use to fight them. Once you win, a third loading screen takes you back to the map. If you do the math here, you're probably going to have to sit through about '''''a dozen''''' or so loading screens to finish just one route in a map for one chapter in the main campaign. Wait -- did we just mention ''just one route''? That's right, you heard us correct, each chapter map actually has ''multiple unique routes'' that you have to clear to achieve OneHundredPercentCompletion, meaning that you'll have to pack a lot of patience for '''''[[UpToEleven a few dozen more]]''''' loading screens if you plan to fully explore a chapter in one sitting.

** ''VideoGame/PokemonDiamondAndPearl'' 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. Also, doing anything with the boxes triggers a flag that causes the game to calculate the checksums of '''all''' boxed Pokémon data on the next save, to make sure nothing got corrupted. It's a good programming practice [[UpToEleven taken into overdrive]].

* ''VideoGame/GuiltyGear -STRIVE-'' has a relatively smooth experience except when it first loads the game. The game needs to connect to the servers first, a process which can take over ''two minutes'' to complete. This is apparently because the game is calling the Japanese servers 127 times and creating a connection with ''every'' one of of those calls, which needs to make 4 round trips for each of them. A modder detected the problem and created a [[https://github.com/optix2000/totsugeki#the-technical-nitty-gritty fix]] for it, cutting the load times to a quarter.

* ''VideoGame/NoMoreHeroes'' has a fair amount of loading, but also includes something to fidget with during them. Pressing the B button lets you bounce the rotating star, and if it goes off the top of the screen, it loops around the bottom and changes colour. This also applies to ''VideoGame/NoMoreHeroes2DesperateStruggle'', only the star is bigger and is in the center of the screen, and rotates faster as you press B repeatedly.

[[DoorStopper down quickly]]. See also DynamicLoading, when loading sequences are performed "behind the scenes" and (hopefully) go unnoticed by the player. No relation with LoadsAndLoadsOfCharacters[[note]]Unless you're playing the [=PlayStation=] version of ''[[VideoGame/MortalKombat3 Mortal Kombat Trilogy]]'', which had one cause the other[[/note]].

* ''VideoGame/FinalFantasyXIV'' is pretty decent with load times unless you have a slow hard drive or are moving to an area that has a ton of players. However, the [=PlayStation=] 3 version is notorious for having very long load times (unless the player swapped out the stock hard drive for a solid state drive) and even if the player loads into an area just fine, there can be times where players and enemies can vanish from the screen because the system can't handle loading all the models.

** ''VideoGame/EchoesOfMana'' gives you a loading screen between any and all transitions, including going from one menu screen to another. This gets very annoying very quickly.

->''"If cartridges were still popular, this game would have finished loading by now."''[[note]]Ironically, this game was later ported to the cartridge-based UsefulNotes/NintendoSwitch, but only digitally aside from a small print from Limited Run Games. This message had been removed in this version.[[/note]]