Load Screen Review

Wolfenstein is one of the oldest game franchises still actively being developed.  The first game in the series, Castle Wolfenstein, was released in 1981, on the Apple ][ computer (and later was also available for the PC, the Commodore 64, and other computers of the era).  This game and its sequel were both stealth games before stealth games were cool, but when id software came along in 1992 and made Wolfenstein 3D, the stealth aspects of the game were dropped, the action elements enhanced, and the FPS genre was born.

It’s interesting to note that it also wasn’t until id software came along in 1992 and made Wolfenstein 3D that a load screen was added to the game.  And with that effortless segway, let’s talk about the loading screens for the latest entry in the series, simply entitled:  Wolfenstein.

Score and full review are beneath the fold.

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The latest entry in the “Tales” series of games is upon us.  Despite being developed by the same team and possessing the same game structure, the same arcade-like combat system, the same off-beat obsession with cooking, several of the same NPCs, and approximately the same character archetypes amongst the player characters, the “Tales” games are actually not sequels to each other, or otherwise related in any discernable way.  Epic battles, epic journeys, intricate plot lines, the Tales games are renowned for these things.  But that doesn’t matter to us here;  we only care about one thing:  Are its load screens equally epic?

There’s only one way to find out…

Oh dear.. this isn’t going to be pretty.  Score and full review beneath the fold.

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The first Ghostbusters movie was released in 1984, and in the following 25 years, there was not a single Ghostbusters-licensed game to include a loading screen.  Until now.  At long last, Mr. Aykroyd has seen fit to provide one, and we’ve seen fit to review it for you, the discriminating aficionado.

Full review beneath the fold.

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It was only a matter of time before the Halo franchise branched out into entirely new directions;  with Halo series’s fantastic highly animated loading screens which catapulted the series into such success, someone was bound to wonder what they could do in a genre outside the first person shooter.

Now Ensemble Studios has brought the Halo world to the Real Time Strategy genre.  Of course, they’re not Bungie, and so one can only wonder how well they’ve managed to measure up against Bungie’s amazing efforts.

So let’s take a look:  how did they do?

Full review beneath the fold

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Street Fighter 4 is the 14th iteration of the Street Fighter series, and the fifth major new version of Street Fighter (the earlier 3D ‘Street Fighter EX’ series, oddly enough, was never given its own number).

Street Fighter 4 is a great new release to look at, as its roots are in the era where games were burnt into ROM chips, and data access times were so low that loading screens were never really necessary.  In the coin-op arcade versions, of course, there were short “Character vs. Character” splash screens to announce the fights, and as games have moved from fast chip storage to slow disc storage, these splash screens have typically become used as the load screens, and this is the case here.  Mostly.

Full review beneath the fold.

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I want to clarify something very quickly, here.  This review of Prince of Persia is a review of the 2008 game “Prince of Persia”, brought to you by UbiSoft Montreal, not of the 1989 game Prince of Persia, by Jordan Mechner.

Prince of Persia makes a nice change from all the complicated multiple-load-screens-in-one-game that we’ve been seeing lately;  it’s a nice return to the heady days when games had only a single load screen which was good enough for every purpose.

Keep reading for the full review.

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Mirror’s Edge is a game based upon Parkour, an informal sport invented by the French which has several times been attempted to be turned into a video game, though never resulting in particularly interesting load screens.

It is interesting that in French, “Parkour” is a homonym for the phrase “par coeur” which translates back into English as “by heart”, and this is certainly a game where you’ll end up knowing most of the levels by heart by the time you complete them.  Ordinarily I wouldn’t mention such a thing, except here it’s important, as when you die (which you will, frequently), you get to see a load screen.  More on that later.

Mirror’s Edge has no fewer than five different types of load screens, used for different purposes.  So with five load screens to cover and not much time, here we go!

Mirrors Edge Chapter Load Screen

Full review beneath the fold.

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Fallout 3 is the sequel to Fallout 2, which was the sequel to Fallout 1, which was a bit of an homage or remake of the earlier game Wasteland, which was a science-fiction version of the then-popular Ultima series which was being made by Origin Systems, which.. okay, I’ll stop now.

Fallout 3's initial loading screen

Full review beneath the fold.

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Fable 2 is (unsurprisingly) the sequel to Fable. It’s some sort of action-RPG thing that’s doing the same old “you can be good or evil” thing that everybody’s been pretending that nobody else has been doing ever since KOTOR was released about half a decade ago. But enough about that; let’s talk about what we’re here for: the loading screen.

Fable 2's Loading Screen

Full review beneath the fold.

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