When you play a video game, you'll always have to wait for the game to
load. From the moment you turn on your PlayStation or Xbox, you'll
wait. Sometimes you might wait a few seconds, other times you might
change the channel and watch a little golf. You'll even fruitlessly
mash buttons in attempt to make the loading screens go by faster. When
the game finally finishes loading, you might get to play some of it,
and then you'll see another loading screen. It makes you wonder, when
developers claim that a game has 40 hours worth of gameplay in it - do
they factor in the time you spend staring out into space?
Recently, the PSP caught some heat for its inordinately long
load times. Some users even posted videos on the Internet describing
their experiences. One game in particular drew lots of ire: WWE
SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006. The game takes multiple minutes to start a
match, regardless of whether you want to use a custom play mode or
simply want a quick match. Long load times aren't anything new; but
when you combine them with portable devices, they're sure to press a
few buttons (pun intended).
We're certain that most of the issues arise from the UMD media and
the optical drive. The PSP has to spin up the drive, seek across the
disc, and load the data. All of these actions require large amounts of
time in comparison to Nintendo's cartridge based system.
In the interests of gaming science, we decided to find out how long it
takes the PSP to move you from a dull glassy eyed stare to actively
playing. We tried to test every game currently out for the PSP, but
instead had to settle for all the games we could get our mitts on. In
the end, we managed to include over 80 games in the article, which
should make for a good representative batch. Our tests showed that very
few games could load up in under a minute. Many games took two or even
three minutes. One game took four minutes to load - WWE SmackDown! vs.
RAW 2006.
Read the full text here...Sarju Shah
October 16, 2006
Source:
Gamespot