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Started by peanutbutter, April 05, 2020, 12:50:10 PM

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peanutbutter

What're some bad ones you remember?



I remember Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets had some shocking loading times between scenes, to the point you'd be wary of exiting a room in case you forgot something and had to go back in.

The Smackdown games on PS1 used to have a minute of loading to get to the menu, a minute of loading between each entrance and a minute of loading before the match. Even at the time this drove me utterly insane so I can't imagine what I'd think of it now.

Always heard really bad things about the PS1 versions of Square's Super Nintendo games, I only played FF4 on PS1 though and cant really remember much in the way of loading. The extra bit of black between room changes probably stood out more to people used to the originals?



Not exactly related, but I tried to play Abzu a few days ago and, after installing it and everything, there was 20 minutes of bullshit to set up when I clicked play. How anyone could think that's a good flow for someone's first play of the game is beyond me, surely whatever updates and all were in that could be put into the installer.

bgmnts

Currently playing Prey and I will admit as brilliant as it is the load times are a bit long.

Rockstar Games tend to have long load times as well when they do need to load. RDR2 on startup you may as well go make a cuppa.

peanutbutter

Quote from: bgmnts on April 05, 2020, 12:56:23 PM
Rockstar Games tend to have long load times as well when they do need to load. RDR2 on startup you may as well go make a cuppa.
I dunno if the load time was actually bad so much as it was hugely jarring, but that one load time in the middle of Vice City must've been considered a gigantic failure within the company. Big fucking long load at the start is grand in a game like that, mid game it's a disaster.


crankshaft

Skies Of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. There were endless random battles (it's a JRPG). You'd hear the laser assembly grinding away, ready to load another battle, roughly every minute. It drove me fucking spare - the flow of the game was constantly interrupted. And so I gave up on the only JRPG I'm ever likely to play.

popcorn

Quote from: crankshaft on April 05, 2020, 01:05:04 PM
Skies Of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. There were endless random battles (it's a JRPG). You'd hear the laser assembly grinding away, ready to load another battle, roughly every minute. It drove me fucking spare - the flow of the game was constantly interrupted. And so I gave up on the only JRPG I'm ever likely to play.

Vivid memories of this. I too abandoned it several hours in, and only managed to play the whole thing once they ported it to Gamecube with 1) greatly reduced random battles 2) a quieter disc drive.

peanutbutter

Quote from: crankshaft on April 05, 2020, 01:05:04 PM
Skies Of Arcadia on the Dreamcast. There were endless random battles (it's a JRPG). You'd hear the laser assembly grinding away, ready to load another battle, roughly every minute. It drove me fucking spare - the flow of the game was constantly interrupted. And so I gave up on the only JRPG I'm ever likely to play.
That reminds me! Chamber of Secrets was on one of those PS2 CDs and I can definitely remember having to listen to laser being loud as fuck.

Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth

I think they might have improved with a patch later on, but the loading times in Bloodborne were ruddy abominable. It took the better part of a minute every time you died, which is a lot. It made a mockery of the very idea of fast travel.

Abnormal Palm

Yeah, they did patch it after about a week, yeah.

machotrouts

Nothing in my life will ever feel as long as the loading times before every level of Crash Bandicoot: The Wrath of Cortex did when I was a child.



I don't remember how long it took exactly; I think 40-50 seconds or so? It was a period of time I hadn't encountered in any other game up to that point, at least. The first time I saw one of those loading screens, I reset the PS2 because I assumed it was broken.

madhair60


Mango Chimes

Someone else can name a particularly long cassette game.

Loading screens are generally unacceptable. Nintendo used to be good at hiding them – Galaxy didn't have any, as I recall, because it did it all behind the scenes whilst you were looking at a menu or Mario was flying around. The new Animal Crossing being full of them, including between rooms in the museum, seems very lazy.

Pink Gregory

Smackdown 2 - Royal Rumble

New wrestler?  Get ready for half a minute of loading while thr Big Show freezes with his legs spread in the air

Also the PS2 version of Killer7 has maybe 2-3 seconds more loading in the scene transitions than the Gamecube version and by god do you feel them

Utter Shit

Quote from: Pink Gregory on April 07, 2020, 11:46:13 AM
Smackdown 2 - Royal Rumble

New wrestler?  Get ready for half a minute of loading while thr Big Show freezes with his legs spread in the air

Ahahaha yes! Infuriating.

I think the one that made me angriest ever was the first time I installed CM00-01 on my home PC, before I knew that - unlike the consoles I was used to - you needed a certain spec of machine to make it playable at a reasonable speed. Setting up the game for the first time took literally an hour if not more, then I got beat 4-1 at Ipswich on the opening day after that WANKER Taricco got sent off. Twenty years ago and I can still remember those details, it annoyed me that much.

GTA Online seems to take insanely long compared to other games I play, a good couple of minutes to load.

MojoJojo

Special mention for Mass Effect (the first one). The load times weren't really long, but they tried to hide them in lifts and other little sections of confined movement. Which meant thousands of years in the future, you end up waiting over a minute for a lift to move 8 ft.

bgmnts

Quote from: MojoJojo on April 07, 2020, 12:12:10 PM
Special mention for Mass Effect (the first one). The load times weren't really long, but they tried to hide them in lifts and other little sections of confined movement. Which meant thousands of years in the future, you end up waiting over a minute for a lift to move 8 ft.

Whilst getting sick from the motion blur.

Captain Poodle Basher

Morrowind on XBox. Entering a building was like playing Russian roulette as you never knew if the load screen would work as planned, take an eternity, freeze for an eternity or crash the game. If it was the latter two then you'd suddenly remember that you'd forgotten to save the game in the last hour or so.

buzby

Quote from: Mango Chimes on April 07, 2020, 11:30:46 AM
Someone else can name a particularly long cassette game.
Delta, Sentinel or Who Framed Roger Rabbit on the C64. The C64 in general was notoriously slow loading, either from tape (due to the low baudrate and the need to load the data twice to verify it) or from floppy (due to is having a brain-damaged DOS). Both fixable either with tape fastloader routines like Cyberload, Freeload, Ocean Loader and Turbo Tape 64 (which also usually contained some form of encryption and copy protection) or by cartridges like the Epyx FastLoad or JiffyDos that replaced the ROM DOS routines.

Most of the snapshot cartridges like Datel's Action Replay, Riska's Final Cartridge and Trilogic's Expert Cartridge also employed some form of fastloader and packer for both tape and floppy that meant their snapshots loaded in a fraction of the time of the original games.

The Crumb

Quote from: Captain Poodle Basher on April 08, 2020, 09:10:39 AM
Morrowind on XBox. Entering a building was like playing Russian roulette as you never knew if the load screen would work as planned, take an eternity, freeze for an eternity or crash the game. If it was the latter two then you'd suddenly remember that you'd forgotten to save the game in the last hour or so.

Ahh, that brings back memories. I think it got worse the more you played, as the game had to load the state of any item you'd interacted with. Pretty sure the advice was close all doors behind you and don't touch anything you don't really need.

Mass effect 1 and its comically slow lifts spring too mind as a not quite successful attempt to hide some chunky loads

Cold Meat Platter

Quote from: buzby on April 08, 2020, 10:21:10 AM
Delta, Sentinel or Who Framed Roger Rabbit on the C64.

F-19 Stealth Fighter was abysmal as well. Really shouldn't have been released on cassette at all. About 15 mins to get into a mission through several loads and if you wanted to complete the mission, save and start another it was back to square one. It was easier to just replay the same mission over again and make no progress. However, it came with a big thick manual with diagrams of planes and tanks to read while you waited.

Blue Jam

The load time for Subnautica gets longer the closer you get to the end. Amazing game but you could finish a three-course meal at some of the later points of the game.

As much as I love Prey that has the same problem when you're moving between different bits of the station.

I'm also remembering how long Alien: Isolation takes to load on startup.

I understand that the problem with these games is that they're massive open-world games where if you move an object or break a window etc that part of the world has to look exactly the same as you left it when you return. Perhaps a new engine is required, I dunno.

bgmnts

Apparently with Prey I read that it actually deletes the last area you visited as well as load up the next one, which means the machine doesn't get too taxed. So its a good thing but still.