Games with the Worst Loading Times

[Tanooki]

If I recall there was a PS2 madden release that had excessive load times. It took awhile to get to the title, even more time to go through the menus, again when you had to load the field itself, and more around that. It was like all the waiting done on commercials or weird breaks in a real game without anything to stare at but a load screen. I remember complaining, not sure what year.

[Niku-Sama]

DOA5 on PS3...

wow bad, especially for a fighting game

[CDiablo]

Mortal Kombat on Sega CD.........Shang Tsung. Metal Slug 1 on PS. XMen/SFighter PS. Any game that makes you load mid stage is not good.

[evildead2099]

If I recall there was a PS2 madden release that had excessive load times. It took awhile to get to the title, even more time to go through the menus, again when you had to load the field itself, and more around that. It was like all the waiting done on commercials or weird breaks in a real game without anything to stare at but a load screen. I remember complaining, not sure what year.

DOA5's loading isn't THAT bad. To be fair, there are a ton of high detail textures that need to be loaded, and the PS3 was so technologically dated by the time the game came out that it's amazing DOA5 plays as well as it does.

[Tanooki]

Ehh quoted the wrong person, I was talking about Madden on an earlier playstation, though I hear the 2015 version is terrible with it too.

[Emperor Megas]

I haven't read through the replies, but some of the worst I remember were:

Willy Beamish on the SEGA CD
Mortal Kombat on the SEGA CD
Splatterhouse on the 360 (probably on the PS3 also).

[Peonpiate]

The worst I ever had, and this may be due more to the lack of CPU power than anything, was the Civilization 2 port on the psx. As everyone knows with Civ games, you use your turn to irrigate land or delegate a city to make military troops, and at the end of your turn you let the CPU opponents take their turn and do the same...The game would play fine early on, but once you hit 1500AD and everyone has a reasonably developed nation made, the game would begin to take 5+ minutes to load up at the end of each turn. At that point you would hopefully have a plan to end the game soon or just quit playing altogether.

Another game with long load times was the PC release of Deus Ex. I recall that some areas could take 1 minute or so to load [the china area i think].

[jammajup]

Well I grew up with the tape cassette games in the 80`s so seconds is nothing,I think the longest loading time I recall is The Hobbit on the C64,I may need to try it some time not sure if it was either 7 or 10 minutes.......

[FoxNtd]

Some game called Relics has to be the worst on the Famicom Disk System.
As I recall it seemed like it stopped to load every 10 steps.

I got to see this game played live lately. There are parts where after the please wait message, you think it's done loading but before you are able to resume playing you go right into another please wait. Yes, the next screen has already loaded and it would seem you are ready to resume play, but you aren't. Now that's bad. For reference the full title is レリクス暗黒要塞 (Relics: Darkness Fortress)

[wizardofwor1975]

Didn't a Transformers game on C64 have a long loading time just to initially start the game?

Which one the Ocean or Activision version? Transformers was a real disappointment on the C64. My favorite vintage computer and Transformers how could they possibly go wrong? Sadly, both versions were pretty bad. However, I always thought the Activision version was the better of the two and your right its loading time was a snails pace at best. In all honesty I think I'm being very generous when I say a snails pace. Makes you wonder: Were we more patient people back in the day or did we simply have no other choice?

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http...hp%3FID%3D2700

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http...hp%3FID%3D2701

[Gamevet]

Skyrim on the PS3 took forever to load a new area. I would pretty much get on my smart-phone to check out posts on forums, while waiting for the level to load.

[WelcomeToTheNextLevel]

I remember Bushido Blade on PS1 had some pretty long load times. I was a kid back then though.

[BlastProcessing402]

A few years ago I dusted off some Saturn games, and some of them were bad on loading times. Albert Odyssey wow, and people thought the FF Anthology/Chronicles had bad load times. Speaking of which...

Actually, FF4 was one of the three which were fixed by Square for America. The loading times in Final Fantasy V, Final Fantasy VI, Chrono Trigger, and all of the Japanese SNES->PSX re-releases were so horrible because they were badly programmed by a Japanese "porting" team which just ran the games through an emulator and played some video cut-scenes at certain points. America's branch of Square heard people's (justified) complaints about the loading times for these PlayStation releases and decided to do something about it. So when it was time to release the PlayStation version of Final Fantasy IV in North America, the company had one of its teams take the extra time to optimize the game. (This was in part due to one of the higher-ups at Square America loving Final Fantasy IV when he was younger.) These improvements were so well received by critics and consumers that the process was repeated for Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II.

If there are any problems with FFIV on PS2, you might want to check your PS2's settings to disable the speed-up options for PS1 games. That should probably fix them. Or, you know, play it on a PS1.

I was recently playing FF4 on my PS2, with the speed option turned on, and it was fine. The only real problem with loading I've had with that game is memory card access. It's got four save slots compressed into two memory card blocks instead of using one block per save like most games, and apparently whatever algorithm they used is really slow. The memo save is a godsend in that game (just remember to really save when you're done).

I also played a bit of FFV, and while it was just a short bit, the PS2 save bug never showed up. Before I used to get that a lot, but that was on an older big PS2 (v4 board) and this time it was a 90000 series slim. I mean, maybe it was just coincidence, but seems I should have hit the bug once even in that short time. I know I couldn't get even close to that far when I tried it on the PS3.


Chrono Trigger, that one is poorly pressed. I get better loading times running it off of a CDR than the original disc even though I ripped the game from that very disc.

[Captain_N77]

If I recall there was a PS2 madden release that had excessive load times. It took awhile to get to the title, even more time to go through the menus, again when you had to load the field itself, and more around that. It was like all the waiting done on commercials or weird breaks in a real game without anything to stare at but a load screen. I remember complaining, not sure what year.

I played the heck out of Madden 2001 and 2002, and kinda tapered off with 2003. I'm not sure which one(maybe it was all of them), but I'm thinking 2001 was the culprit. I don't remember menus taking long to load, but I remember counting how long it took to load a game up and it was usually 40-60 seconds.