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What games had the worst loading times?

PS1 WWF Smackdown games. Playing season mode is watching loading screen 50% of time. Oh, and many loading screens were NSFW (or notsafewhenmomwalksin).

In SSD era Space Marine is the worst offender, a linear (often corridor) shooter taking that much time to load is very strange.
 
Am sure it's far from the worst but Bully on the ps2 comes to mind. Loading times were long and you would constantly go in and out of buildings around the school which increased the frequency of the loading times. Much better on xbox 360 versions and others.
 
Afaik, the C64 had a pretty shit floppy disk drive that was slow as fuck, so probably some C64 game that required you to change disks regularly.
 
German Shocks said:
I remember reading a Game Informer article back in the day where people were complaining about loading times for Mortal Kombat on PS1. Apparently, whenever you transformed with Shang Tsung into another character it took like 2 seconds to load the new texture.

Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD was bad as well, with it taking up to 3 seconds to load in between matches.

I also remember watching a friend play the Chrono Trigger port for the PlayStation 1 and every time he went into the character inventory screen (which is a frequent thing in rpgs) it had something like a 10 second loading time. It was painful to watch.

Sad Jimmy Fallon GIF by The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon
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The Witcher 3, Days Gone and Prey are definitely something on ps4.
 
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Hudo said:
Afaik, the C64 had a pretty shit floppy disk drive that was slow as fuck, so probably some C64 game that required you to change disks regularly.
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Disk drive? Us peasants couldn't afford one of those, shit was like a cartridge compared to the nightmare of tapes.
 
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Have a few Switch games installed to the sd card that have fucking infuriating load times. I think Little Nightmares 2 was particularly bad.
 
RPGs suffered the most from this early days. A battle in Grandia takes forever from start to finish, including the results screen. FF IX also takes a while to load a battle. Poor usage of the consoles sadly. Quite long in Skies of Arcadia as well with all characters and enemies loading one by one.

Games like Shining Force CD and Shining Force III have zero loading times between map and battle sequence, despite the huge amount of characters, enemies and all the quite elaborated spells and special attacks. Camelot knew their stuff. They actually used the RAM efficiently and stored all possible data in it, and designed their games to ensure a smooth experience.
 
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Nothing beats the cassette games of old, I guess.

Still, every time I replay a game from the PS1 to the PS3 era, I'm amazed at how patient I used to be.
I remember being pretty annoyed at the loading times in Shadow of the Damned, and God knows how I could beat Demon's Souls and Dark Souls on console several times.

Loading times were pretty much the reason I never beat a Tomb Raider game twice on console. In the later levels you could play for ten seconds, die to an unpredictable trap, and spend 45-60 seconds waiting for the level to reload. I applaud people who beat Tomb Raider 3 on console, I really do.
 
The transition from SNES/N64 to finally SSDs in PS5 era was quite rough. I hated load times. No matter if seamless streaming took over afterwards, the load eg. in Uncharted, RDR, all Ubisoft games was just dragging the mood down every time you boot up a game.
Iirc longest was Metro Exodus. That took minutes. I assume a game already designed with SSDs in mind but crippling the spinny storage experience.
 
The original release of The Witcher 1 on PC was very slow when loading levels. This was probably the only game on PC which managed to be so slow at loading that I even remember this till this day.
 
Obviously there's cases such as the start-up loading for GTA V on 7th gen (and even 8th gen).

I always remember the HORRIBLE load times in Dragon Age Origins after dying.
Oh and loading into a race on Gran Turismo 5.
 
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German Shocks said:
Mortal Kombat on the Sega CD was bad as well, with it taking up to 3 seconds to load in between matches.
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Street Fighter 2 Alpha for SNES has awful load times, like 5 seconds between fights (that is, a black screen and nothing happening for 5 seconds in a format where transitions were immediate). Recently I was playing Little Big Planet on Switch 1 and it would take 25-30 seconds to load after every death. Same with Bright Memory: Infinite, you would play like 15 seconds until a boss killed you and then wait 30 seconds for the game to reload. Note that I'm not mentioning disc games which are usually slower. Nor cassette ones because I never played with them. And already forgot everything about diskettes.
 
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Polaris said:
My brother and I were so excited to play Half-Life 2 around the time it launched that we played it with a less than adequate PC.
I shit you not, every single loading screen lasted a solid 5 minutes.
Both of us completed the game several times under those conditions.
It's that good.
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Actually, semi-related story, i remember playing Team Fortress 2 on a fairly low-end 2007/2008 laptop that consisted of a GeForce 8400GT, a Core 2 Duo T5200 (or something lower end), and 2GB of RAM.

It used to take me, i shit you not, 15-20 minutes to load into games. And I had to lower the settings to like 480p to get around 60fps. Yet I still tolerated it because TF2 is glorious.
 
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Metro exodus on the PS4 was one of the worst in recent memory. Took something like 3-4 minutes, even after loading the stage it was still loading objects right next to you into the environment.
 
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Nvzman said:
Actually, semi-related story, i remember playing Team Fortress 2 on a fairly low-end 2007/2008 laptop that consisted of a GeForce 8400GT, a Core 2 Duo T5200 (or something lower end), and 2GB of RAM.

It used to take me, i shit you not, 15-20 minutes to load into games. And I had to lower the settings to like 480p to get around 60fps. Yet I still tolerated it because TF2 is glorious.
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I lived through the era of tapes and floppies, so I know the pain of a real sandwich-maker...

When I think of load times though, the suffering that comes to mind first is Midnight Club 3 on PSP. That game took minutes every time you wanted to race. On a handheld. While your battery drained and drained as you waited to play...

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There were worse PSP performers like the notorious WWE Smackdown (although in general, I think the UMD gets a bad wrap and smart developers eventually got it under control.) However, MC3 hurt me personally because it was otherwise an amazing port in the PSPs first year, but to even restart previously loaded race restarts cost 90 seconds. Thankfully, the PSP version of the sequel Midnight Club LA Remix fixed everything.
 
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Pillars of Eternity 2 on consoles was basically unplayable. Especially because the load times got longer the more you played, and every transition was at least a full minute of loading.
 
Crash Team Racing Nitro Fueled. It was bad on PS4/XBO. On Switch it was hilarious.

Could sometimes take 50 seconds to load a race on Switch.
 
ReyBrujo said:
Street Fighter 2 Alpha for SNES has awful load times, like 5 seconds between fights (that is, a black screen and nothing happening for 5 seconds in a format where transitions were immediate).
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Despite the compression getting blamed at the time this was a coding error which modders have fixed.
 
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