Exploring the load times of PSP games

It’s what riles up both gamers and reviewers everywhere: excessive game load times. Especially with a device designed to be portable, handy, and on-the-go-gaming as the PSP. Well, it can’t be avoided, since the PSP uses optical-based UMD, not cartridges or flash memory. Now the UMD does give PSP games many advantages, but the biggest draw has to be the time it takes to spin up the disk, fire that laser, and read all that loading data.

So, the gaming mechanics over at Gamespot decided to investigate the phenomenon that is the PSP game load time. By “load time” they mean the start-from-scratch loading of game data, not from the PSP standby mode. They’ve got a full list of average load times for different games on their site, but we’ll give their summary data for easy reading.

(By the way, it’s not all the PSP titles out there. They could only play a varied – and hopefully representative – selection of PSP titles to test their theories out).

By far the biggest offenders are sports titles. They all average around 133 seconds of staring blankly into a loading/splash screen. The worst by far – among the tested games, anyway – is WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006, which bites off 245 seconds of the average gamer’s lifespan.

Shortest times belong to puzzle games, clocking up an average of 74 seconds of wait-to-play. They’re followed by turn-based strategy titles (84-85 seconds average) and action-adventure (88.4 seconds).

Patience may not be one of the gamer’s essential virtues – especially for a game-on-the-go device like the PSP – but Gamespot considers the load time as the price we pay for the greater storage capacity of the UMD vs. solid-state cartridges. From that perspective, we can also consider the standby mode a smart move by Sony – if they realized beforehand the load time issues that the UMD setup would face.

Frankly, load times in general are a b****. But patience is still a virtue. For me, personally, if the game’s that hot and that good, I could wait for a couple of minutes or so before I start punching buttons. How about you guys? How long can you wait before you can get your head into the game?

It’s what riles up both gamers and reviewers everywhere: excessive game load times. Especially with a device designed to be portable, handy, and on-the-go-gaming as the PSP. Well, it can’t be avoided, since the PSP uses optical-based UMD, not cartridges or flash memory. Now the UMD does give PSP games many advantages, but the biggest draw has to be the time it takes to spin up the disk, fire that laser, and read all that loading data.

So, the gaming mechanics over at Gamespot decided to investigate the phenomenon that is the PSP game load time. By “load time” they mean the start-from-scratch loading of game data, not from the PSP standby mode. They’ve got a full list of average load times for different games on their site, but we’ll give their summary data for easy reading.

(By the way, it’s not all the PSP titles out there. They could only play a varied – and hopefully representative – selection of PSP titles to test their theories out).

By far the biggest offenders are sports titles. They all average around 133 seconds of staring blankly into a loading/splash screen. The worst by far – among the tested games, anyway – is WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006, which bites off 245 seconds of the average gamer’s lifespan.

Shortest times belong to puzzle games, clocking up an average of 74 seconds of wait-to-play. They’re followed by turn-based strategy titles (84-85 seconds average) and action-adventure (88.4 seconds).

Patience may not be one of the gamer’s essential virtues – especially for a game-on-the-go device like the PSP – but Gamespot considers the load time as the price we pay for the greater storage capacity of the UMD vs. solid-state cartridges. From that perspective, we can also consider the standby mode a smart move by Sony – if they realized beforehand the load time issues that the UMD setup would face.

Frankly, load times in general are a b****. But patience is still a virtue. For me, personally, if the game’s that hot and that good, I could wait for a couple of minutes or so before I start punching buttons. How about you guys? How long can you wait before you can get your head into the game?