I've been playing Disgaea 3 for a while now. Quite enjoyable I must say. It's the kind of game you could just sink your life into. I'm more than fifty hours in, and that's barely scratching the surface of what can be done. 2,000 game hours anyone? The most I've done is 140+ and that was on DragonQuest VIII. I'm going for big here!

I have been training characters, and sometimes they die early on me. It's at this time that I implement a nice little feature that's on most - if not all - Atlus games: the glorious 'quit' feature. You quit the game, and are instantly taken back to the initial game menu, where you can pretty much load your game back up in an instant. The PS2 Disgaea game had this feature as well. It got me thinking about another thing that has changed a lot with video games since I was a kid - loading!

I was 14 at the time; a new Crash Bandicoot game came out for the NGC and PS2 Simultaneously. My friend had grabbed a copy for his PS2. It wasn't until I watched him play it that I say his complete hate for playing the game. It wasn't that he disliked the new Crash game, but that he hated booting up the levels, and rightfully so! I watched in awe as the levels took upwards of an entire minute of loading time. "I hate this" he said, "why the hell should I sit through one minute intervals every time i wanna retry a level? It's ridiculous."

I agreed with him, and I still do today. It's funny to think of what we lost, versus what we gained when we put the cartridges away and started using optical discs for our gaming medium. We gained so much! Computer generated graphics, CG cutscenes, DTS surround sound and full speech tracks [cartridges didn't have the capacity to have an entire game spoken, and it was also something that needed to be compressed to 16 bit 'cartridge' sound, cutting down the quality dramatically]. We even gained the huge improvement on game capacity and the games themselves were cheaper for the companies to produce! But the leap from old, chipset gaming to computer gaming came at the price of data loading.

Anyone that has never played an older, cartridge based system has a surprise coming if they ever use one. We gamers that grew up right with our games understand what we have gained and what we have lost, and made our peace with it. Anyone who hasn't might freak out at the 'instant on' ability of older games. Put the cartridge in. Flip the power switch. Game time! There's no in between. Even the system logos were placed on the front of the game! There was no BIOS introductory phase. Wait maybe five or ten seconds for the game developers to shower you with their logos, and you're good to go. Pressing the reset button was instant as well, instantly cycling you back to the beginning of the game.

So, with all the technology we have, why can't we eliminate loading times? One reason is that cartridges sported the same tech that the consoles main board and RAM had; printed circuitry. The data was in digital format, and the cartridge served as an attachment or add-on to the console's motherboard, allowing nearly instant transmission of the cartridge data to the RAM. Modern consoles have to have the disc read, via an optical laser, then once that's finished, it needs to be relayed to the RAM, and then to the Graphics Processor Engine. This is a slow, painstaking process that is partially mechanical instead of digital. Machines can only go so fast. Thus, we wait. Also, cartridge games were able to be compressed DRAMATICALLY without loss of game quality, some N64 games clocking in at roughly 40 MB for the BIG games, and thus the consoles were able to copy larger sections of the game to the RAM at at a time.

The N64 can load an entire game level into its RAM at once with ease, whereas the PS1, while a great system, has to load the level one small piece at a time. Basically, it loads the level as you advance through it. For our modern game consoles to copy over entire levels at a time, we'd need a LOT more RAM than we do at the moment, and it just makes it unrealistic. A PS3 has 256 MB of RAM, and I'm pretty sure you'd rather have the game load from time to time instead of paying 700 dollars just so your PS3 could have enough RAM to eleminate loading times.

The interesting thing, as I write this, is that we are getting better with loading. The PS3 serves as the best example. It has so much processing potential that it has nothing to use for, so they designated one of 8 cores specifically for game loading. PS3 games are also designed to install loading related data to your HDD to further speed up in-game loading. Since the data on your HDD is already read and in data format, it can be sent directly to the GPU. The result? PS3 games typically load once at the beginning of the game, and the rest of the loading is done smoothly in the background; your game never stops until you do. Disgaea 3 takes advantage of this with the feature I mentioned. Since the game is already loaded, taking you back to the main menu with no lag is no issue.

I've said enough on the subject for now. The more I write, the less likely I'm to be read. Will we ever eliminate loading times with our optical media? For it to happen, we need more RAM in our consoles, and CPU/GPU power on par with the PS3's. We need even more data copied to our Harddrives for instant loading. Considering the dramatic increase in HDD size and decrease in pricing [HDD's were up to 400 GB when I was in tech school, and 200 dollars to boot, compared to the 2 TB we have now for the same price] I'd say loading times might just be on their way out of the gaming world. And to that, I say good riddance. I'm sure you share the sentiment. -Astro-