Please Wait...

Not just the title of the first song I ever wrote (a terribly emo affair, probably created around 5 years prior to the birth of the 'emo' genre...), but a request which seems to expend most of my gaming time nowadays.

A great and oft overlooked thing about modern handheld consoles (such as the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP...) is their uncanny ability to store your game state to RAM on sleep, enabling you to pause and recommence gaming as often as you wish.  Contrast that, then, with most home console boot times averaging around 20 seconds, and most games startup time averaging around 60 seconds from inserting the disc to beginning to play, probably a 1000% increase from NES-era consoles.  I know games have grown and expanded and the HD revolution is upon us, yadda yadda, but I feel this overlooked issue is a bigger problem than many realise.

If you, like me, are prone to bouts of unbelievable laziness after a hard day at work (well, a day at work anyway....), then you too might be feeling the pains of all this waiting to game.  And this problem is compounded if I'm in one of my 'don't know what I want to play' moods.  Playing 10 cathartic minutes of Left 4 Dead before continuing a serious quest on a more time-invested game is the way I generally like to play, but in the knowledge that after having waited 5 minutes to boot the console, start the game, navigate the menus, find a server and connect to a team, and then after playing eject the disc, re-box it, go all the way over to the games shelf, get another game, unbox it and boot it etc.....I usually end up playing for 15 minutes and then turning off the console.

A few modern games developers have coined on to this fact; the latest GTA games seem to only require a short loading between missions, and a 30 second or so load time at the outset enables the gamer to roam Liberty City without any breaks in play.  Modern Warfare 2, I noticed, glazed over load times by using them to display FMVs and information about the upcoming mission.  Even older PlayStation games like Ridge Racer used to cover load screens with minigames, an easy-to-implement tactic that other developers would do their best to emulate, had Namco not patented the technique...

From Wikipedia: 

Minigames

Some games have even included minigames in their loading screen, notably Skyline Attack for the Commodore 64 and Joe Blade 2 on the ZX Spectrum.

Namco owns the US Patent for the use of minigames during the initial loading screen,^[3] and have included variations of their old arcade games (Galaxian or Rally-X for example) as loading screens when first booting up many of their early PlayStation releases. Even to this day, their PlayStation 2 games, like Tekken 5, still use the games to keep people busy while the game initially boots up.

Still, this, I believe, is the very least that we should expect from the games of today in terms of loading times.

This probably sounds like an inane problem and something which is completely of my own invention, and it may well be.  I just find it hard to believe that in today's hi-tech consoles there isn't the ability to quickly suspend, reboot or swap games.  I used to love playing games from the hard drive of my original (modded) Xbox; the ease of which I could end one game and begin another without even having to get up, coupled with the increased speed of load times from a hard drive rather than optical media was a joy to work with.  I can see why games consoles don't allow this sort of operation as standard, even though some have started to allow the copying of optical data to their internal hard drives for decreased load times.  But it's still not good enough, in my eyes.  I only hope that future consoles begin to show these traits, putting the power back in the hands of the gamers.  I think we need to remember that we play them, not the other way around....