Dear SHELPSHOT:
I really like my state of the art video game consoles–I have them all and must have played almost ninety games! I play them for the newest and most realistic electronic experience, which makes me feel like I’m in the future! I have a pretty big gripe though: Every game I play seems to take forever to load to the next level! Blazing through titles is majorly difficult when I have to spend sometimes over fifteen seconds waiting. Is there a faster game deck I can buy to cut down on my downtime?
James G.
Cheyenne, WY
Gosh James, we’re sorry to hear that your control decks aren’t able to keep up with your input, but this is the perfect opportunity to discuss an often overlooked feature of video entertainment: load time! Games will often, for dramatic purposes, cut to a black screen while bits and bytes are walked along the various information caches located throughout the electronics boards of your game consoles and game cartridge packs. While energy moves at the speed of light, these pauses or “load screens” are elongated to draw out the suspense of what lies in subsequent stages, or to drive home the ultimate goal of the experience. Some games even display graphics and minigames with the load screen.
Take the game program Tomba! for the PlayStationX: the main goal of this game is to bite as many evil pigs on the head as possible–an easy task for any experienced game player. But there is so much realism in the settings of Tomba! that it is easy to get lost in the beauty of the neolithic utopia. That is why the game designers programmed in a secret mini game on the load screen.