Now Loading
We take a closer look at the load times for the PSP games.
December 06, 2004 - One of the greatest area of concern from IGN's playtest yesterday of Ridge Racers was over load times. Twenty seconds to start up? Fifteen seconds to get to a track? Are you serious?
Our measurements yesterday were, admittedly, imprecise. We simply started up the game and counted one-one-thousand, two-one-thousand and so-forth until something appeared on screen (hey -- it worked in grade school!). Because you demanded it, we decided to do something a bit more precise as we headed out to the PSP display in Ginza today for the second time. This time, we had one of these in hand:
That's right, it's a genuine Hello Kitty wristwatch. Widely known as one of the most precise wristwatches targeting young girls as well as boys who like pink, we drafted this watch to measure PSP load times because... well, because it was the closest watch nearby when we realized that the sucky IGN Japan cell phone doesn't have a second counter. The second counter on the Hello Kitty watch is, by the way, the little circle in the lower hemisphere.
With trusty Hello Kitty watch at our side, we got to playing each of the PSP games on display (well, four of the five, anyway -- we don't know nothin' 'bout no Maaw-jawng games) in order to fully test the load times.
The thumbnail images that appear below, incidentally, are genunine PSP material. They were pulled off the save game folders that the games create when saving to Memory Stick. Be sure and check out our separate Memory Stick feature elsewhere in today's headlines.
Ridge Racers
First off, we have to apologize to Namco and all the Ridge Racer fans out there. The numbers we presented yesterday were a bit off. We stated that the game takes ten seconds to load up the interface screen for selecting a car and track. This isn't always true. Here's the full word on how the game loads as measured by Kitty-chan.
Starting up the game from the XMB menu or from a power off, following the Sony Computer Entertainment and PSP logos, the screen goes blank for 16 seconds before the Namco logo appears. From there, there's no more loading until you enter a race. The car and track selection screens don't have any loading when you first start the game, as they're apparently loaded during the initial loading period.
Once you've selected a car and track and set your choice for automatic or manual transmission, the game takes between 13 and 15 to start the race. These extremes are based on the four tracks that we were able to try out.
Finish a race, and there's zero load time to start a replay. However, when you select to go back to the car and track selection screens, the game goes through about ten seconds of loading (this is where we got confused yesterday).
We still hope that playing around with the options will reveal a shortcut for track and car selection (as was used for fighting games back in the 32-bit days) so that we can jump right into a new race with as little delay as possible. Even without this feature, though, the load times aren't all that bad. The game's interface is so smooth and attractive that we couldn't believe we were looking at a launch title, and the lengthy, intense races that await make the loading times okay with us.
Dokodemo Issho
We were only able to play a little bit of this game before we felt like jumping out the nearest window, but here's the lowdown on load times. Starting up the game from the XMB menu or a shut down (again, following the SCE and PSP logos) takes twenty seconds. Starting a game up from the title screen takes another ten seconds. Going back to the title screen, which you can do any time, takes five seconds.
Once you're actually in the game, there doesn't seem to be too much in the way of load times. It wouldn't matter one way or the other, though, because, Dokodemo Issho is such a slow-paced game that... well, as we said, we rather quickly felt like jumping out the nearest window (or at least throwing Toro out).
Mojipittan
Perhaps because of the simple nature of the game's visuals, this appeared to be the fastest loading of the titles. There's a ten second time to get to the Namco logo from the XMB menu or shut down, followed by another ten seconds before the title screen came up. That's it, though. The game runs smoothly following that, with easy navigation back and forth between modes without having to wait.
Minna no Golf
SCE's launch title takes about twenty-four seconds to start up from the XMB menu or power off. Once you've selected a character and course and are ready to head on out, there's another 19 seconds of waiting. Get to the course, and there are only a couple of seconds of waiting between holes.
Worse than the load times is the choppiness of the interface. Select an option from the menu and the game will freeze for a couple of seconds, with the music blanking out, presumably as the data for the next screen loads. Selecting a character and changing clothes both have similar interface issues. The game isn't ruined or anything, but we're hoping that the version on display isn't the actual final version of the game and it will be improved before release (or, barring that, Sony Computer Entertainment America will clean things up for the US version).
Load times for ending a game and going back to the menu screen? We'd like to give some numbers but we couldn't figure out how to actually exit a game. We pushed all the buttons, then ended up pressing home in order to exit the title entirely before starting the game again.
So, of the four games that we tried, Hello Kitty gives five Happies to Mojipittan for a quick load session followed by a smooth gameplay session. Ridge Racers gets 4.8 Happies because its load times aren't too bad considering how ambitious it is (it's got all the presentation of the best home racing games). Dokodemo Issho hasn't been rated because Kitty-chan fell asleep while Toro was speaking. Minna no Golf gets two happies, with the possibility of more if the version we played isn't actually the final build and things are improved for the version we play on 12/12.
All these values were arrived at based on playing a system running via AC. We'll report back with battery tests once we have the PSP and games in less than a week.
