8 Blatant Loading Screen Cover-ups in Games

Back in the early days of disc-based gaming, companies weren't afraid of sticking a "Now Loading" screen in your face every two minutes. Now, companies employ stupid tricks to avoid them. Here's the worst ones:

8- Katamari Damacy's King of Cosmos chatter

Admittedly, the King's loading screen appearances were a welcomed interuption at first. However, as with all loading screens, they got extremely repetetive and obnoxious. At first we laughed at the King and his non-sensical statements. Eventually phrases like, "Maybe We'll invent a Cosmic Esperanto." made our eyes roll back into our skulls. These wouldn't even make the writers of SNL laugh. Shut your trap and just let us roll some more buses, dad.

7- Tony Hawk's American Wasteland's tunnels

Back in 2005, Tony Hawk's developers made sure everyone knew their latest skateboarding cash-grab had NO STAGES and NO LOADING, even though it totally had both. You see, when your skater wanted to go from one "part" of the city (read: stage) to another, he or she would have to skate through an unimaginative hallway or tunnel filled with weak trick lines. Oh, and lots of disc spinning noises. Of course, you could skip those and hop on a bus, where you could walk around and do nothing. But hey, NO LOADING!

6- Castlevania: Symphony of the Night's corridors

While they aren't the worst offenders in the world in terms of masking load times, Symphony's empty corridors offend us from an interior decoration standpoint. Can you imagine Drac telling his designer "In between the room with the two giant demon dogs and the five-story high floating platform terrace, can we get a ten yard corridor where NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS? That'll really throw my son off my trail."

5- Metroid Prime 3's slow-opening doors

At first we weren't sure about this one. It seemed like Metroid Prime was glitching. Did the developers forget that when you shoot a door it should open? Eventually we realized that the delay between shooting a door and it opening was, in fact, an improvised loading screen that would have you standing idly by for up to five secods. This occasional, yet unbearable wait became even worse if you were trying to escape an enemy-filled room rather than just running about in a fit of exploration.

4- Assassin's Creed's fog

The first thing that came to our minds when we encountered this screen was, "Oh, how quiant. Yet another unecessary, convoluted plot feature to drag this game down." Instead of having Altair wandering aimlessly through the fog of his memories, they should have just plastered the screen with images of Jade Raymond dressed as a schoolgirl pouting. That would probably make a little more sense. And by "make a little more sense", we mean "make us aroused".

3- Fighting game versus screens

During the days of Street Fighter II, we welcomed versus screens with open arms. Getting to see large, detailed portraits of characters that looked decidedly better than the four-inch sprites in karate getup was a treat and a respite from the fight. Most importantly, they were short, as they didn't buffer any load times. Now, with fighting games leaving the arcade and originating on consoles, we're forced to look at the same characters we've been gazing at for a decade now, except now the versus screens seem to stretch on just a bit too long.

2- Mass Effect's elevators

You know what's worse than suffering through a long elevator ride? Suffering through a long elevator ride knowing that the fate of the entire universe rests in your hands. And yet, that's exactly what you have to do in the Mass Effect. Never mind that it's set thousands of years in the future and that humans have mastered inter-stellar travel: they just can't seem to get a firm grasp on elevator technology.

Yes, we're aware that each area in Mass Effect is huge and the elevator rides are necessary to disguise the fact that they're being loaded but couldn't they have come up with something a bit more inventive? Heck, we would have even settled for a flight of stairs because at least we'd be actively moving around instead of just standing there, staring at the wall.

1- Resident Evil's doors

As far back as we can remember, Resident Evil was the first game to really stylize its loading screens. The suspenseful door scenes were innovative and added a lot to the atmosphere of the original game. But, when we had to traverse the entire map for a single item, we'd play for about an hour, and fifty minutes of that would be spent watching a door slowly creak open. To exploit the door-phobic market they should just rename this game, Resident Evil: Doors.