Man, after playing with discs and dealing with the sometimes rediculous loading times, I am starting to miss the old days where the cartridges went "bodda bing bodda boo" and almost instantly went to the next frame. I understand cartridges are considered obsolete in terms of graphical and sound capabilities, but it sure would be nice not to have to see the "please wait" or "loading" screen after choosing something new on the menu screen or making a confirmed choice. Anyone else feel the same?

I've always missed cartridges. I think the PS1 using CD's was one of the biggest mistakes in gaming due to the super long load times. Others would argue it is great due to lower costs. Due to the large size of games, cartridges aren't feasible any more. One day we may be able to go back to cartridges, but I have my doubts other than for portable systems.

Definitely. Load times are a pain in the ass. However, I had tape games on the Commodore 64 that would take something like ten to fifteen minutes to load up. There is no comparison.

It's a Catch 22. Cartridges are much more expensive to produce, since they're proprietary, but there are practically no loading times (I believe I've only played two cartridge games with load times, and they were bad ports of CD-based games) and they often came with stuff to beef up the console. For example, a lot of SNES games had extra RAM or the SUPER-FX chip.

That will be a damn good day if that ever comes true. Hell, it's 2009, they should be able to easily find a way to do it.

I've always loved N64 games the most because those cartridges are so cool.

They were alright, they had no side labels though which got really annoying. I think the coolest looking ones were the SNES ones.

The biggest advantage disc-based media has, in my opinion is backward-compatibility. Even though they use different discs, it's much easier to make them backward-compatible. Hence why you don't see any new ystems that can play NES/SNES/N64 cartridges but the Wii CAN play Gamecube games.

That bothered me a little too, but I like the sleek shape.

SNES games are good too but they haven't grown on me as much since I didn't have many of them as a kid.

Well I miss cartridges from like the SNES on up. The NES days sucked. Dunno if it was the carts, the system, or both. But getting a game to start up was a task in of itself. But once it did play, no load times. No freezing. It was cool. I know when I first played the PS1 at a cousin's house, we put in a baseball game. And I could not believe the loading times. One to start the game. One before the opening sequence to show the field. One when stats were shown. And then, some point in the first inning, the game locked up. Due to a damaged disc I'm sure. And I couldn't help but wonder, who in the hell would willingly deal with this crap.

First party Nintendo games tend to not have load times, or they're hidden well enough that you don't notice. I know the GC was the system built to really minimize load times, and you only saw them from cheap ports of PS2 games, which seemed to be filled with them.