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  • Load times quantified by GameSpot

    by 
    Andrew Yoon
    Andrew Yoon
    10.19.2006

    Gamespot recently wrote an impressive feature on load times for the three dominant handheld platforms on the market. They wanted to see how long it took for a game to become playable from a completely powered-down system (no standby mode, which is available on both the DS and PSP). Here are some interesting facts from the write-up: The three quickest loading games were Astonishia Story, Gradius Collection and Lumines. They took up to 55 seconds to load. The longest loading game is (unsurprisingly) WWE Smackdown!: more than four minutes for that game. Games with the highest ratings on GameSpot had the shortest load times. Joystiq asks "Does this show that reviewers appreciate short load times, or just that better games tend to be designed to load faster?" I'd say both hold true, but as games like GTA and Daxter show, developers that care about the PSP know how to get around load times. The average load time for cartridge-based DS? 24.5 seconds. The average load time for UMD-based PSP? 103.4 seconds. This shouldn't be surprising to any PSP owner, but it's fascinating to see the numbers. I hate load times a whole lot, and I will avoid games that have insanely high loads. That being said, I don't see one minute loads to be too bad at all. What about you? What do you think about load times?[Via Joystiq]