The Video Game Critic

After dealing with the Xbox One for much of the week, I switched gears and played some NES games today.  When I flicked on the system and the game was there, ready to play, it was almost a shock to the system.  I really did a double take.

It seems like with modern systems it's just taking longer and longer to get to the games.  Will we ever get back to having system with instant start up times?

I guess this is yet another reason to love classic gaming.

Well let's try and convince manufacturers to stuff full games on an SSD 'cart' for a reasonable price.

Lol good luck with that...

Console makers should really start including an option that allows you to play whatever disk is in the system upon startup (bypassing any "home screen").

The Wii U recently got an update that allows you to start up a game directly from sleep mode from the gamepad. You never go into the main OS screen, you just pick from 8 of your most recently played games or applications.

It is not as fast as NES, obviously, but still kinda nice.

It's not just the load times. You absolutely must see the annoyingly-animated logos of all the companies involved in the making of this game. And then there's all the licensing stuff, logos of all the fancy tech they put into the engine, etc.

Sadly, I don't see this going away. With discs, it's just not possible (unless the company really puts time into it). Even with downloads, everything needs to load off the hard drive, and hard drives are just big discs. Maybe flash memory, once it gets cheap enough.

I dunno,I do like me some short sweet boot-up screens...those never tire.

But yeah, I see what you mean. This sort is a problem with portable stuff as well.

You should connect your wii u to the internet to get the latest update. It now has a quick start menu so you can instantly laun h a game you've been in recently when you turn on the system

Yeah, actually the new Wii U update is pretty neat. Helps cut down the time by about half.

Still, I miss instant start up times of classic games. I remember thinking GTA 3 had really long start up times but at least you could start the system right away. I guess this is just one of the costs of making affordable, more powerful consoles. At least trhe 3DS is pretty darn qucik.

You must never have played an tape game... aces of aces comes to mind on the Atari 800xl.  40 minutes to load the game.  Then it said the engines were on too high and the wings fell off.  So after 2 minutes the plane exploded.  So it was another 40 minutes to try again.  That was the first and only time I played that game. 

Though I know what you mean.  Cartridge systems were like, you wanna play a game here I am!  I miss those days....