Games with the Worst Loading Times

[Nz17]

Sonic The Hedgehog [2006] (Xbox 360 & PlayStation 3)

Why, SEGA, why couldn't you give this game 9 more months to cook in the oven? It could have been good, but no, you just had to rush it for the 2006 holiday timeframe. Gotta cash in on those birthday and Christmas sales, right? Not when you put out a game in this bad of a state and it skyrockets to infamy you don't!

Amongst Sonic The Hedgehog [2006]'s many, many problems were the loading times. Whatever you do, follow a FAQ or a walkthrough if you must play this game so you can avoid talking to anyone with which you don't need to talk. Why? Loading times! It's like the whole game was made up of separate modules so every time you activate ANYTHING the whole module's assets have to be loaded even if 99.99% of the assets are the same so it's wasting time reloading the majority of what it needs. Seriously, just talking to someone whose 3D model, textures, voice clips, and almost everything else have already been loaded will result in a 30-40 second load time. Why? Because the game was loading the module wherein that characters talks to you, so all that time had to be wasted to read in a couple of lines of... text. That's right, a huge amount of time wasted on just a few lines of text, taking even more time than the earliest of home computers to get that text onscreen! And if you are extra unlucky, it will happen again after the dialog concludes so that it can load up the hub you were in beforehand... even though you could see the whole hub while you were in the conversation!

Extreme Pinball (PlayStation)

Seriously, Extreme Pinball on the PSX takes extremely long (something like 40 seconds) to load the pinball tables, but it ALSO takes the same amount of time to load the menus, so if you start a game, pick a table, decide to change a setting, and then go back to the table, it takes 40 + 40 + 40 + 40 seconds, or 160 seconds (2 minutes 40 seconds) total! Ridiculous! The pinball tables are good and they were programmed/designed by the same developer as the one which made Epic Pinball, and he wrote highly optimized assembly code for that game, so I know the problem can't be with the original version of Extreme Pinball - the problem has to be with the port. While this game was lousy with loading times on the PSX, I expect that the original MS-DOS version has instantaneous loading times like the original Epic Pinball does, so I am hoping to eventually pick up Extreme Pinball for PC in the future.

[buzz_n64]

I don't know about current generation consoles, but for previous generation consoles, PS3 was horrible for initial loading. I think it took over an hour to get into gameplay on Max Payne 3 when you play it for the first time. The Hyperscan with any game suffered horrible load times. For classic gaming, any game that loaded from a cassette tape drive, like a Commodore 64 cassette, took FOREVER!

[Niku-Sama]

GT HiFi mode in the first GranTurismo.

always seemed to take FOR EVER to load

[Alianger]

The most recent one I was annoyed with is NSMB Wii where it takes like 13-14 seconds to re-enter a castle level after dying. Doesn't sound that bad compared to OP examples but it can grate on you if you keep dying, which you probably will in co-op.

[Tanooki]

I remember that somewhat fun Blaster Master PS1 budget title would fall into this. It's not that the times were terribly long (they weren't) but the amount of them adds up to probably piss off even some of the more patient people out there. Every time you pop into a room (game was broken up into square blocks basically for the map) it would unload the old, load the new. Didn't matter if the assets were shared or anything, it started with a blank slate from the look of things so you had to wait and wait and wait everytime you went somewhere. Not quite as bad if you're clearing a room, but if it's one you can roll through easily or have cleared out, that sucks as you're loading more than moving.

[celerystalker]

Pretty much anything on Neo Geo CD, but some of the fighters, sheesh... they'd load backgrounds and sprites separately, load between rounds... if you let Last Blade run its stage openings, it was pretty horrific.

[bb_hood]

You have not experienced loading times until you have played the Amstrad cpc 464.
The games load off cassettes and take literally 5+ minutes to load.

[SparTonberry]

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.

As well as Dracula (Castlevania) II. Right at the start, an enemy can knock you off screen, forcing loading time for the next area, even if you didn't want to go there. Makes the HORRIBLE NIGHT complaint in Simon's Quest look like nothing.

I stopped playing the PS1 version of Chrono Trigger due to loading time. Having grown up on the SNES version, it's a bit annoying when it stops to load a battle. But that like 2 seconds wouldn't be so bad if (as I recall) it didn't wait to acknowledge you touched an enemy (playing the encounter sound effect and changing the music).
But the worst offender is the menu. It takes like 5 seconds or so EVERY TIME. It's pretty obvious the game was shoddily ported (did they try to just recycle the SNES code as much as possible with bad results rather than recode the game in a way optimum for PlayStation?) On top of that the sound is definitely on par with era fan-emulators. :P
Quite glad the DS version came along to give us the extra content with fixing those problems. :)

I think people say FF4-PS was terrible too with load time. I played just a bit but for me it seemed to load too fast (as in, music desync). Though that was with a GH copy on a PS2 if that makes a difference.

[Aussie2B]

The loading in Art of Fighting on PC Engine is pretty hilariously long.

[Tanooki]

Got another one, it's not that it's so long but just terrible that it's a cartridge game and a fighter no less because it has to mass decompress the data off a storage chip.

Street Fighter Alpha 2. Nearly 5sec of lag to load up the characters/stage data, then once it says ready fight, you have another 3second before it actually unfreezes decompressing more data so you can fight.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G_cMvmzNRYQ

[Gameguy]

I'm going with Mickey Mania on the SNES. For whatever reason this cartridge game has loading times, these weren't in the original Genesis version so it's just a lousy port.

[tom]

Any British tape software on C64 or A8.
Or any software on disc for the C64.

[retroguy]

Duke Nukem Forever on the 360 has pretty horrendous loading times, but it doesn't seem so bad compared to something like Fallout New Vegas where the loading times are reasonably short but they're EVERYWHERE so it takes forever to get from one side of town to the other once you actually reach Vegas. Installing the game to the hard drive helps, but it's still a pain.

[YoshiM]

007 World is Not Enough for N64 is a pretty bad offender. It's been a while since I played but the level load screens seemed to take forever. On a cartridge.....what gives?

[mailman187666]

Mortal Kombat for sega cd was kind of annoying. It had to load fatalities, Shang Tsung's morphing between characters. The begging of each round was "Round One..............Fight"

I think MK2 on the Sega Saturn was hit with a lot of the same loading issues.

[FieryReign]

I'm heavily into 3DS stuff nowadays, and I must say, the loading times for alot of these games are atrocious and ridiculous. Even on a New 3DS. These are still considered cartridges right? Why do they load like UMDs? It's supposed to be portable, who in their right mind would let games be released that way? If I wanted to sit around waiting for load times and system updates, I would've bought a (faulty)modern console...

Right now, I'm messing around with the Fast and Furious game and these load times are worse than any CD/DVD game I've ever played. It's a surprisingly fun game, but when you stare at load/menu screens longer than actual gameplay, you take notice and get pissed off for haphazard development. What the fuck happened to Quality Control? It exists where I work, why not multibillionaire companies?

[Nathan Dunsmore]

Peter Pan: Return to Neverland (PS1) is pretty bad. When you die you're booted back to the level select screen, so you have to sit through the load screen TWICE just to restart a level.

[FieryReign]

How could I forget about my DC guilty pleasure? Dragonriders: Chronicles of Pern....


It's such a pathetically put-together game. So much so, that I actually enjoyed my time with it. Even knowing that it was completely unfinished and thrown out the door with no regard, at the end of the systems life. Shame on you, Ubisoft. At least it was budget priced, but it's still desrespectful by Dreamcast standards. It is a really hilarious game. Almost like this was released as a joke. Not funny if you still owned a DC, at the end of its life...

[goldenband]

Worms World Party for Dreamcast is pretty terrible in this regard -- not because the load times are that bad, but because they're forced on you in situations where they should be completely unnecessary. For instance, there's no way to retry a challenge stage without quitting back to the main menu, which means you're hit with 2 separate sessions of loading.

I seem to remember that Spirit of Speed 1937 had some bad loading times, which is a shame since it was kind of a cute concept.

The best DC game I've ever played re: loading times is Toy Commander. It's practically seamless.

[SparTonberry]

Got another one, it's not that it's so long but just terrible that it's a cartridge game and a fighter no less because it has to mass decompress the data off a storage chip.

Technically incorrect. The data is in the ROM, the SDD-1 is not a storage chip but a coprocessor that decompresses (supposedly!) faster than the SNES' own CPU could.

[Koa Zo]

Punky Skunk being played on a PS2 has some questionable loading times.
There are times where the game actually doesnt load, disc just spins forever after the Playstation startup logo. But other times I've let it spin for 10+ minutes and the games finally started, still yet other times it loads in a reasonable time of 10 secods. I figured it was a disc issue, so I tracked down a sealed copy (years ago) and the prestine disc has the same behavior.
I've wondered if this has to do with PS2 compatibility issues.

[Tanooki]

Kind of splitting hairs there on the SDD1. Regardless of wherever the data sits, it's being repeatedly decompressed per each fight to load up the area, then the data to make the people move and do the rest and it's kind of annoying but as I understand it really unavoidable.

[WoodyXP]

The loading in Art of Fighting on PC Engine is pretty hilariously long.

It's glitchy, too. If it gets a bad read during the load it starts over. And when that progress bar goes backward it's timed perfectly with some dude talking smack. Hate it.

As for me PS3's loading times for Bayonetta were pretty annoying.. I heard they fixed it with the patch but I didn't stick around for that.

Skyrim for PS3 was bad, too. I hated how it had to load every room you walked into.

[Nz17]

I think people say FF4-PS was terrible too with load time. I played just a bit but for me it seemed to load too fast (as in, music desync). Though that was with a GH copy on a PS2 if that makes a difference.

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. ;)

[Nebagram]

Crash Bandicoot: Wrath of Cortex on PS2 had some pretty shocking loadtimes. Part of the problem might be because it was on a CD rather than a DVD- most CD-based PS2 games in my experience had longer loading times than those on DVDs.

[turboexpress]

GTA and GTA2 playstation. wow this takes forever between certain parts.

[sashadarko]

When it comes to loading times, DiRT 3 is the ultimate winner.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEaO00wIRwg

[Kaypar]

I've been playing a lot of GTA Online recently, and the frequent load times between city sandbox and gamemodes are brutal. It's even worse when you come off of an activity, wait, and then get denied entry into a session, so the wait time about doubles as the game goes and finds another session to join. I always have a 3DS game on standby just to make the load times more bearable.

[retroguy]

EDIT: Whoops. My brain did a stupid thing where my eyes saw GTA Online and my brain registered it as Elder Scrolls Online. Nevermind.

[postulio]

I think you guys are confusing load times with full on game installation.

Personally I think pretty much every 2D fighting game on the PS1 was borderline unplayable due to the frequent and lengthy load times.


Edit: what are you playing GTA Online on that it is so slow? I play on PC with a good connection and don't really notice any load times after initial log in.

[Kaypar]

My friends have the same problem, but none of us have any trouble getting into single player unless we're coming from GTA Online.
Come to think of it, we don't get too much trouble with desync when in a session, either. Connection only seems slow when trying to go to or from online sandbox. Wonder why that is. It might just be the connection in my area?

[LiquidPolicenaut]

Can't get through a conversation on long load times without mentioning Willy Beamish on the Sega CD. It's a great game but those are, to date, still some of THE worst loading times I have ever had to endure through in a game..

[NightBlader]

Sonic 06. Need I say more?

[goldenband]

I've heard Willy Beamish was bad, which is a shame since it seems like a fun game.

That said, it's hard to compete with the old cassette loading times. Here's one (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2OPt8r2_wTI) that took over 10 minutes!

[Steve W]

EA's The Last Gladiator on the Commodore 64. I attempted to play that at my brother-in-law's house back in the day, and it took something like 15 minutes or more to load up. The game started, I didn't know how to play, and I was killed pretty quick. Then the game... reloads for another 15 minutes. And that was with a Fast Load cart installed.

[YoshiM]

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

[Haoie]

Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly

Even the loading screens had a loading screen. I kid you not.

Also, Dragon Quest VIII - I love the game but there's so much loading! It would've worked better as a PS3 title.

[jm-9]

One that always stood out to me was Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets for PS2. That game has loading times whenever you enter a different room. Also the PSP version of GTA: Chinatown Wars. There's a one-to-two second loading time whenever you access the menu, which you have to do a lot in that game. What makes it even worse is that GTA: Liberty City Stories and Vice City Stories on PSP have instantaneous load times. It's a shame, because it's got many improvements over the DS version otherwise. From what I've heard the recent XBOX 360 remake of GTA: San Andreas has similar load times.

[evildead2099]

Soldier of Fortune for the Sega Dreamcast features some of the worst loadtimes I've ever experienced. After waiting for what seemed like an eternity to play the game, I was killed and then had to wait for the damn stage to re-load. I literally broke my Dreamcast in anger, then snapped the GD-ROM in half and vowed never to play that awful port ever again.

Although it's a decent trivia game, the Dreamcast version of South Park: Chef's Luv Shack features way too much loading, especially for a game so ostensibly simple. Not even Soul Calibur makes the Dreamcast's optical drive work so hard to load information during gameplay. I'm positive the problem is rooted in Acclaim's lazy programming.

I have Duke Nukem Forever for the PC. That game is known for having awful load times, especially on the Xbox 360. I can confirm that the load times aren't pleasant, but they could be worse. (Then again, I run the game off a SSD, so that almost certainly reduces how much time I spend waiting between levels.)

Although it's an otherwise great port of a really fun game, the PS2 port of Quake III has really bad loading times.

[evildead2099]

I think you guys are confusing load times with full on game installation.

Personally I think pretty much every 2D fighting game on the PS1 was borderline unplayable due to the frequent and lengthy load times.


Edit: what are you playing GTA Online on that it is so slow? I play on PC with a good connection and don't really notice any load times after initial log in.

The only 2 PS1 2D Fighters I played were Marvel vs Capcom and Street Fighter Alpha 3. MvC is a respectable port if you can overlook the inability to tag your character out of fights. SFA3 is a freakin' awesome port. World Tour Mode and extra characters like Dee Jay makes it superior to the arcade game it was based on.

[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%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D2700

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%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.