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SvennoJ on 24 March 2015
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Tachikoma said:
SvennoJ said:

That's because you didn't need to reload the entire game every time you died...
I did moan about space quest 4 in the past where every new screen took 30 seconds to load. That was annoying to play on 7 5.25" floppy disks. Pray you didn't need to back track a bunch of screens.

Erm, many games did not support playing from the point of death over again, many actually required you reload from tape, Sly Spy, Ghostbusters II and so on.

Califonia games would make you load, fron tape, each stage, then load the results screen, then rewind the tape to start the events again on side B. multiple other games also required that you rewind the tape and start over to play again once you died, it was only the smaller stuff that could fit most of the game data within the memory that didnt.

More extreme cases were games like X-out, where you had to load the game intro, then load the shop, then load the level, then if you died, load the highscore table, then the shop, then the level, EVERY time, and each of these load processes were 2-5 minutes a piece, then if you actually got past the first level, it would load the next, but if you died you had to reload that level, which meant letting the tape play through all the previous data to get back to the second level data, and each level you progressed, the load time each death would get longer, and longer, the last level would require 15 minutes of load time of the casette deck each time you died, just to continue that level.

This was not an uncommon situation, either.

I guess I was spared that. I grew up with an MSX. Games either came on cartridge, instant loads, or tape with 1 long initial load. Jet set willy 2 was pretty huge in my young mind, never seen an extra load screen. I was already annoyed with the games on tape that first spend a minute loading a fancy splash screen before loading the actual game.
A friend of mine had a c64, never had extra loads either. Or maybe he never played those games.

The harshest game I had was king quest 1, pirate copy, couldn't save. There's 1 point where I kept dying near the end, and had to start from the beginning again. That's one good deterrent against piracy :)

Anyway it's 2015 now. Not that hard to cache data and re-use assets instead of reloading everything piece by piece. Read cached start of level data in 1 chunk, reset char attributes, done.