The short load times are a nice advantage to the Game Cube and Xbox. I'm guessing its the Mini-DVDs that help the Cube. Not sure about the XBox, but I'm betting the hard drive is used to really help out the Xbox on load times.

I love it how Smash Bro's has almost zero load time. I've been very pleased with most of the GC to date.(other than wave race.)

I take it that because the disc is smaller- the load time is faster. However, I'm not initially sure about that statement. Can anyway verify the reason for GC rapid load times?

Getting load times down is not so straightforward as some of you may think. There is a fine art to fast loading. There are many factors at play and just because one game has a super fast load does not necessarily mean that should be possible for all. If a game has very fast loads or invisible loads that most likely means the developers thought about this from the very beginning, which doesn't happen all the time.

I would think any reasonable person would agree with me when I say that they would prefer for the game to take as little time as possible to load up.

No - I like long load times, it adds to the suspense. Especially when I'm waiting for the main menu to load up... ooooh suspenseful.

they are a good time to run and take a leak.

What you need to do is run out and buy a Commodore 64 and a 1541 Floppy drive. I remember waiting upwards of 10 minutes for some games to load (Winter Games, anyone?).

And don't get me started on the tape drive!

A day or two of that will speed up your PS2s, guaranteed!

I remember buying special cartridges just to speed up the loading times on that system! You pretty much had to have them to get loading times down to a reasonable level. I can also remember playing games with my brother long after we were tired of them and wanted to play something else, because putting in a new game took too much time.

I stopped playing black and white because of that. Long load to preload the last game played, but then I would load my game, so it loads twice. grrr