Dream Tropes Wiki/Loads and Loads of Loading

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"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."

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Ah, Loading Screens. How we loathe them, and yet how common they are. However, those aren't 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.

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 the era, and cheered when they were replaced by the much faster hard disks. But it didn't take too 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...

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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, on an optical drive, compressed data can be faster to load and decompress than uncompressed data...so it's a double-edged 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 a thick one you can put

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down quickly. See also Dynamic Loading, when loading sequences are performed "behind the scenes" and (hopefully) go unnoticed by the player. No relation with Loads and Loads of Characters.

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In general, this is less of a problem of modern consoles, as they largely work by installing from the disc to the hard drive - once that's done, the disc is only used for checking that you own the game. Still, this trope certainly hasn't disappeared.

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## Video Game Examples

### Shoot 'em up

* Most of the *Lucky Star* games from the Driller Engine 3 era onward do this.
	+ The PlayStation, Sega Saturn, and PC versions of *Lucky Star: Symphony of the Night*, are notorious for their long loading times. The loading can be as short as five seconds for stages, but it can take up to 15 when loading up an entire save file. And guess what? Every time you get a game over, you go back to the title screen to reload the game. Thankfully, the Nintendo 64 version fixed this issue.
	+ *Lucky Star: Aria of Sorrow* isn't immune to this either. But this time, it's on all versions of the game. Some stages actually stop scrolling for small periods of time to give the PlayStation 2, Xbox, and GameCube more time to load portions of larger levels.
* The VanellopeDash exclusive *Super Smash Keyboards: R-Evolution* has infamously long loading times, because the system's games released on compact discs.