Playing With / Loads and Loads of Loading

1 Following

Basic Trope: A game takes ages to load.

• Straight: The game takes 2 minutes to load the main menu, and once you start the game it takes 30 seconds to load a level and another 10 seconds to respawn each time you lose a life.
• Exaggerated: The game takes 30 minutes to load the main menu, and each level takes 5 minutes to load. The game is Nintendo Hard and a loading screen shows up each time you respawn.
• Downplayed: The game's loading screens last 10 seconds.
• Justified:
  • It is a big game with lots of things to load.
  • The game was designed to run on a high-end system and it's being run on system that is nowhere near as powerful.
  • The game is so awfully programmed that assets take way longer to load than what they should.
  • The game is trying to load from servers that have been sunset ages ago, not realizing that this is an exercise in futility.
  • You only have one floppy drive attached to your home computer, whereas the game's loading routines are optimized for two or more drives^note Drive A: main disk, drive B and beyond: asset disks.
• Inverted: The game loads almost instantly.
• Subverted:
  • The loading screen was only waiting for user input.
  • The loading screen is merely a monitor texture.
• Double Subverted:
  • But then another long loading screen comes afterwards.
  • You actually get to play the Game Within a Game being loaded on that monitor/computer in the last chapter.
• Parodied:
  • The game takes twenty years to load, and the system is long obsolete by the time it finishes.
  • The loading bar outright goes backwards and even stretches off screen for an even longer period of loading.
  • The loading bar is the game.
  • "Please insert Disk Mouthful of Pi", "Please insert Disk Googol", "Please insert Disk Googolplex", "Please insert Disk Graham", "Please insert Disk Infinity", "Please insert Disk Infinity + 1"…
• Zig Zagged:
  • The game seems to take forever to load, but it loads quickly. Then another loading screen pops up and seems stuck at 99%
  • The game system the game was released on is notoriously unstable. Depending on the position of some internal components, the same content might take a few seconds or a few minutes to load. Percussive Maintenance is listed in the manual as a way to speed up load times.
  • The last chapter is at the tail end of a Year Inside, Hour Outside plot, as far as the real world is concerned the game only took a few seconds to load.
• Averted: The game takes an average amount of time to load.
• Lampshaded: The protagonist says "That was a long wait!"
• Invoked: ???
• Exploited: The developers put ads on the loading screen.
• Defied:
  • The player tries to make the game load faster.
  • Dynamic Loading has rendered the loading practically invisible to the player.
• Discussed: "This game takes FOREVER to load!"
• Conversed: "Why do these games always take so long to load?"
• Implied:
  • It seems like the player is using the system for hours, but the game is still on the loading screen.
  • Bob's skeleton is seen sitting at a computer, whose screen is shown saying "Loading 99.999999% complete. Please, do not turn off the power."
• Deconstructed:
  • The game gets many bad reviews for having long loading times and sales drop.
  • The long loading times indicate that the game was never designed to run on the system it was made for and as a result other aspects of the gameplay suffer.
• Reconstructed: A patch is released that makes loading times shorter and it causes customers to buy the game again.
• Played For Laughs:
  • The loading screen is made to look funny.
  • The game takes a lot of time to load even when tested on a supercomputer of the kind used for scientific simulations.
• Played For Drama: The long loads cause players to be angry at the developers, and it causes a huge riot outside the game studio's building.