Portable Gaming Revolution

Ever since the PSP was released last year, load times have been the bane of every PSP gamers existence…. okay, maybe that’s going a little overboard, but they are extremely annoying! I know that I’ve decided against picking up certain games if the load times have been reported as being unbelievably long.

GameSpot has taken this idea and run with it, creating a study on… you guessed it, load times! They’ve gathered together as many PSP games as humanly possible, in their case they ended up with about 80 games, and tracked how long it would take to go from turning the system on to being able to actively play.

Unsurprisingly, they found that the more graphically simple a game was, they shorter the load time. Games like Lumines and Bust-a-Move Deluxe ranked in as two of the best with load times of 54 and 55 seconds, respectively. The absolute worst game was WWE SmackDown! vs. RAW 2006, coming in at over a minute past the next longest game - it takes more than four minutes to load!! Needless to say, but I’m going to anyways, the sports titles timed in with the worst waits while puzzle games were the best.

Interestingly enough, they decided to rank the PSP along with Nintendo’s GBA and DS systems to compare. I have to say that Nintendo has definitely figured out the load problem for their systems, with the average DS game taking under 30 seconds while the overall average for the PSP came in at over a minute and a half.

If you want to see how your favorite PSP game ranks against others, GameSpot has posted a list with every game that they tested. So… while a handfull of the games will load in about a minute, most take anywhere from 2 - 3 before you can get your game on. What are your thoughts on how long is too long?