Windows *

I would imagine that the whole time you are watching the intro movie and and waiting for the press start to continue the game is preloading content in the background. I imagine that is why on zelda games you have to watch a short bit of intro before you get the chance to press start, or tap the screen or press A + B. Same with the new Metroid on the wii.

Another trick is to just not show the usual "LOADING..." or a bar or anything that makes you go... "Urghh, its loading again!" You may get a black screen, or a chapter title that perhaps hangs around a bit too long, but you don't notice.

 

The Wii is particularily good at hiding its loading times - take WiiSports for example: all that "Strap this thingy on" crap is just a great cover. Even so though, the loading times aren't bad at all.

 

Absolutely. Subtlety is clearly underrated when it comes to this sort of thing...

I just remembered another one. Aliens vs Predator 2! That took close on to 5 minutes to load on my old machine, and it was way past the minimum specs. I used to just minimise it and play DX-Ball...

 

Didn't even think of D2, or many other RPGs... probably because the loadtimes never bothered me. I suppose that's a good sign - if you don't think about the load times of a game, they weren't bad at all.

It always seems to be FPS games that are the worst. Which is even more annoying as they're generally much faster-paced so it really shows.