Longest loading times

[kawickboy]

Du to his lovely introduction, trantor isn't a quick loading.
Shinobi on tape was awful, after a game over the loading was really long.

[RocketRanger]

The (big-box) cassette version of North & South is pretty much unplayable due to being a French disk game hastily crammed on two cassettes for the UK market. It's also missing the train sequences, animations and most of the battle maps.


Load the language selection screen (takes ages)
Load the menu (takes ages)
Turn over tape rewind, load map screen (takes ages)
Move your men
Put in tape two rewind to the beginning to load the fort sequence (takes ages)
die
Rewind tape for map screen (takes ages)
Move your men
Put in tape for battle, rewind to the beginning to load the battle screen (takes ages)
Battle is won, rewind tape for map screen (takes ages)
Move your men again...etc


Unless you experienced it, it's difficult to convey how much this ruined the entire experience. Since battles/fort sequences happen almost every other move, you are literally rewinding the tape and re-loading a mini game almost every time you move a piece.


I have no idea if the AA cover-tape version suffered the same issues, the disk version was fantastic but the tape version was nothing but a paper weight.

[zeropolis79]

I never got the tape working on my 6128

[Nich]

The (big-box) cassette version of North & South is pretty much unplayable due to being a French disk game hastily crammed on two cassettes for the UK market. It's also missing the train sequences, animations and most of the battle maps.

Unless you experienced it, it's difficult to convey how much this ruined the entire experience.

My brother had the cassette version of North and South. I don't know how he had the patience to play it, but he did.

I have no idea if the AA cover-tape version suffered the same issues, the disk version was fantastic but the tape version was nothing but a paper weight.

The AA covertape version had a bug that meant it didn't work on CPC6128 machines. When @ChaRleyTroniC was compiling the tape, he was running out of time and didn't get a chance to test it properly on a CPC6128. There is a patch included with issue 3 of Better than Life, but I'm not sure if it works. I tried using it, and as far as I can remember, the game still didn't work even after being patched - although I could be wrong about this.

[zeropolis79]

I'm lucky I have the retail North and South on real 3" disc.

[jaymanu]

I remember Pac-Land to be crazy long (even back then !) from tape

[Shaun M. Neary]

Oh I've a few easy candidates for long-ass tape loaders.

Fiendish Freddy's Big Top O' Fun. It was sequence, event, judges all loaded separately from tape. Great game, but a real bad multiload nightmare on tape. It took ages.
World Class Leaderboard. All the levels were block loaders and really sapped any momentum during the game play.
Road Runner: Same as WCL. In fact, I think it was developed by the same team and used the same loaders.
WWF Wrestlemania: The multiload on that wasn't too bad, but if you wanted to change your wrestler, the whole game needed to be re-loaded from scratch.
Blood Valley: Even for Dual Master fans, the loading time for this was as pleasant as a root canal without anesthetic!
APB: You had to reload the entire side B for every level. That tape got smashed to bits back in 1990 in my house.

I can probably come up with more later.